期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：1998
卷号：95
期号：15
页码：8951-8956
DOI：10.1073/pnas.95.15.8951
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：A male zebra finch, Taeniopygia guttata, kept with its father until adulthood develops an imitation of its father's song motif. We report here that the completeness of this imitation was sensitive to the social or auditory context in which the bird grew up: the greater the number of male siblings in a clutch, the shorter the mean duration of the song motif and the fewer the mean number of song notes imitated from the father; the latter shortfall was not compensated by other, improvised notes. We call this effect fraternal inhibition. Fraternal inhibition was avoided by members of a clutch that developed the song first. To our surprise, this role commonly fell to one of the younger birds in the clutch. Early song learning may influence fitness since individuals that produced the most complete imitations also tended to induce more egg laying.
