American swamp sparrows may have sung the same songs for more than 1,000 years and passed them on through generations by learning, according to researchers at Queen Mary University of London, Imperial College London and Duke University.
American swamp sparrows may have sung the same songs for more than 1,000 years and passed them on through generations by learning, according to researchers at Queen Mary University of London, Imperial College London and Duke University.
The study, published in Nature Communications, demonstrates that birds are capable of matching and potentially exceeding the stability of human cultural traditions despite their much smaller brains.
The researchers were able to estimate that the swamp sparrows (Melospiza georgiana), a well-studied species of songbird from the marshes of north-eastern USA, accurately learn their songs 98 per cent of the time.
More surprisingly, they do not pick songs to learn at random from those that they hear. Instead, they selectively choose songs that are more common - a learning strategy called conformist bias which was recently only thought of as particular to humans.
Read more at Queen Mary University of London
Image: American swamp sparrows may have sung the same songs for more than 1,000 years and passed them on through generations by learning, according to researchers at Queen Mary University of London, Imperial College London and Duke University. (Credit: Robert Lachlan)
