Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence (Seewiesen site)

Chickens provide important insights into its complex mode of action

New study reveals surprising female influence on song learning in zebra finches

Researchers give adult zebra finches back their ability to learn new songs

First Max Planck Center in Africa will study how interactions between species lead to coevolution and influence biodiversity

Their first vocalizations help young zebra finch males to memorize the songs of adults

Anna Proß of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology researched the vocal behavior of nightingales in Ghana. Here, she talks about her encounters with venomous snakes, her new fondness for plantains, and she reveals how ornithologists are making the most of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two shadows flit around in the evening light. A bat is chasing after a moth in a wild dance between hunter and prey. For Holger Goerlitz, pursuits like this one are a real thrill. The leader of an Emmy Noether Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen is researching how bats and insects use sound to detect each other.

No zebra finch emerges from the egg as an accomplished singer: each young bird first has to take singing lessons. Songbirds are therefore excellent model organisms for the study of learning processes in vertebrates. Manfred Gahr and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen are conducting research into how various songbird species learn their songs and what happens in their brains during the process.

Until recently, following the crowd was not seen as a desirable goal in life. These days, however, everyone is talking about swarm intelligence. But are swarms really smarter than individuals? And what rules, if any, do they follow? With the help of new computational techniques, Iain Couzin from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell imposes order on the seeming chaos of swarms.

Seasonal and weather-related changes in environmental conditions are normal in almost all parts of the world. They affect the availability of food and the energy expenditure of animals in a largely predictable way. However, we are currently experiencing a significant increase in annual temperatures and, in particular, in the frequency of extreme weather events. It is therefore important to understand how the body's internal processes respond to environmental changes and mediate adaptations of animals to be able to assess whether species will be able to cope or become extinct.

Animals rely on their sense of taste to detect nutrients and avoid toxins. However, different species can have very different senses of taste: what tastes sweet to humans tastes very different to cats and to birds. Diet shifts happen frequently across the phylogeny of animal species. Changes in diets, for instance, from  omnivorous to carnivorous, can be associated with changes in taste receptor number or function. Understanding how and when taste receptors change gives us insight into how new behaviors arise, how proteins evolve new functions, and into the evolutionary process itself.

Within species diversity in morphology and behaviour is widespread in nature. In ruffs, a substantial amount of this diversity is encoded by variants of a supergene that have different fitness consequences for males and females.

During a good conversation we typically rarely interrupt each other. Although we often already know what we want to say, we suppress our own pronunciation until the other person has finished speaking. How does the brain control this behavior? To better understand the mechanisms involved, we took a closer look at the calling behavior of zebra finches and the neural processes taking place. Like humans, zebra finches coordinate their vocalizations depending on the social situation. This interaction is based on a temporally ordered interplay between inhibiting and excitatory neurons.

Duet singing is a form of social interaction between two individuals which requires the precise interindividual coordination of vocal emissions. How the brain controls this cooperative behavior was so far unknown. Here, the individual vocalizations and the underlying brain activity in free-living pairs of duetting songbirds has been recorded in parallel with novel miniature transmitters. The data revealed that preprogrammed temporal duet patterns in each songbird’s brain were altered by the partner’s vocalizations to enable optimal interindividual coordination during joint singing.