Developmental effects of daily food availability times on song behaviour and neuronal plasticity of song-control system in male zebra finches

Mishra, Ila; Batra, Twinkle; Prabhat, Abhilash; Agarwal, Neha; Bhardwaj, Sanjay Kumar; Kumar, Vinod

doi:10.1016/j.bbr.2020.112497

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 46 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…4C; the song data in Figs 1 & 2 were replotted to be compared with weight changes), further 5 supporting the independence of SS-induced song changes from physical stress. These results are also consistent with a previous study that the pitch and amplitude of undirected songs are significantly affected by food restriction only when food is restricted in early life but not in adulthood 20 . In summary, the song changes induced by SS are most likely caused by the lack of singing behavior, rather than stress.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 93%

The song does not remain the same: daily singing of adult songbirds prevents passive changes in song structure independently of auditory feedback

Mizuguchi¹,

Sánchez-Valpuesta²,

Kim³

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many songbirds learn to produce songs through vocal practice in early life and continue to produce many renditions of learned songs daily throughout their lifetime. While it is well-known that adult songbirds sing as part of a mating ritual, additional functions of their singing behavior are not fully understood. Here, we demonstrate that adult singing outside the reproductive contexts functions to prevent passive changes in song performance. Using a reversible behavioral manipulation, we suppressed the daily singing behavior of adult zebra finches produced in the solo context for two weeks and examined its effect on song performance. We found that singing suppression significantly decreases the pitch of song elements and both amplitude and duration of song motifs. This suggests that adult song is not acoustically stable without singing and that adult birds maintain their song performance by daily singing. Moreover, suppression-induced changes in song structure were substantially recovered within two weeks of free singing even in deafened birds. Thus, the recovery of song performance does not necessarily require auditory feedback but rather is caused predominantly by singing behavior per se (i.e., the physical act of singing). Finally, unlike the auditory feedback-dependent song plasticity previously reported, passive song changes caused by singing suppression were not significantly dependent on age. Our findings demonstrate that adult songbirds maintain song performance by preventing passive song changes through the physical act of daily singing outside the reproductive contexts throughout life. Such daily singing presumably functions as vocal training to maintain the neural and/or muscular system for song production in optimal conditions to make the best song performance in reproductive contexts.

show abstract

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 93%

The song does not remain the same: daily singing of adult songbirds prevents passive changes in song structure independently of auditory feedback

Mizuguchi¹,

Sánchez-Valpuesta²,

Kim³

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…4C; the song data in Figs 1 & 2 were replotted to be compared with weight changes), further supporting the independence of SS-induced song changes from physical stress. These results are also consistent with a previous study that the pitch and amplitude of undirected songs are significantly affected by food restriction only when food is restricted in early life but not in adulthood 22 . In summary, the song changes induced by SS are most likely caused by the lack of singing behavior, rather than stress.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 93%

The song does not remain the same: daily singing of adult songbirds prevents passive changes in song structure independently of auditory feedback

Kojima

Mizuguchi

Sánchez-Valpuesta

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many songbirds learned to produce songs through vocal practice in early life and continue to sing these songs daily throughout their lifetime. While it is well-known that adult songbirds sing as part of their mating rituals, the functions of singing behavior outside of reproductive contexts remain unclear. Here, we tested the hypothesis that adult singing outside of reproductive contexts may serve to prevent passive changes in song performance. We found that suppressing daily singing for two weeks altered the acoustic and temporal structure of song, and that the song structure substantially recovered within two weeks of free singing. These reversible song changes were not dependent on auditory feedback or the age of the birds, contrasting with the adult song plasticity that has been reported previously. These results demonstrate that adult song structure is not stable without daily singing in non-reproductive contexts, and suggest that adult songbirds maintain song performance by preventing passive song changes through the physical act of daily singing throughout their life. Such daily singing likely functions as vocal training to maintain the song production system in optimal conditions for song performance in reproductive contexts, similar to how human singers and athletes practice daily to maintain their performance.

show abstract

“…These behaviours could correlate with various vocalisations and thus change the intensity and amount of calls. Other research on birds has shown that the amount of calls songbirds produce will fluctuate over the day (Mishra et al, 2020). Since the time of measuring the prestress situation was in the morning, it could also be concluded that the birds were more active during this time and thus produced more sounds.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying the Effect of an Acute Stressor in Laying Hens using Thermographic Imaging and Vocalisations

Heuvel

Graat

Youssef

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The laying hen sector has multiple issues concerning the animals welfare. One crucial factor negatively impacts chicken welfare is stress. The conventional way of measuring and assessing chicken stress is time-consuming and subjective to the assessor. On the other hand, sensing and sensor technologies can be used to obtain objective, continuous and non-invasive/contactless measures of animal behavioural and physiological welfare indicators. The present study aims to investigate the use of thermographic imaging and microphones (sound) in obtaining objective indicators for acute stress in laying hens. During this study, 40 laying hens were stressed by opening an umbrella as a stressor starting from one day age until nine-weeks old. The birds were stressed every other day. Another 12 birds were housed in another cage. These birds were not stressed and served as a control group. The surface temperatures of the birds comb and beak decreased (1 C and 2.5 C respectively) in response to the applied stressor. This effect was only seen in the treatment group and not in the control birds. The number of vocalisations the birds produced significantly decreased shortly after stress. The number of calls in the stressed group decreased from 39.5 to 12.1 calls/minute, where the control group decreased from 27.8 to 22.5 calls/minute. It was hypothesized that the number of vocalisations would increase after stress. This difference could be due to the daily behavioural rhythm performed by the birds. The birds might naturally produce more calls at certain hours of the day because of certain behaviours they perform. Three different neural network algorithms were employed to differentiate between the vocalisation of stressed and the control group. This was done by converting the audio files to images and feeding them to the pretrained convolutional neural networks (CNN). The Resnet CNN had the highest categorising accuracy with an overall accuracy of 86 percent. The changes in surface temperature of the beak, comb, eye, and head, as well as the results from the audio analysis could serve as potential indicator for acute stress in laying hens. Future research is warranted to validate the methodologies and findings under different environmental conditions and stressors.

show abstract

Developmental effects of daily food availability times on song behaviour and neuronal plasticity of song-control system in male zebra finches

Cited by 6 publications

References 46 publications

The song does not remain the same: daily singing of adult songbirds prevents passive changes in song structure independently of auditory feedback

The song does not remain the same: daily singing of adult songbirds prevents passive changes in song structure independently of auditory feedback

The song does not remain the same: daily singing of adult songbirds prevents passive changes in song structure independently of auditory feedback

Quantifying the Effect of an Acute Stressor in Laying Hens using Thermographic Imaging and Vocalisations

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About