Birds Revealed To Understand And Fall In Love
Given their penchant for songs — and general reputation — people tend to think of birds as a means for ambiance. They’re the source of nature’s music, but even so, they’re still living beings with wants and needs. Incidentally, some of those needs aren’t too different from humans’. Thanks to them, love is in the air — in more ways than one.
The Max Planck Institute for Ornithology gathered 160 zebra finches to test their mating habits, and found an interesting aspect. As per the experiment’s rules, the female finches were allowed to freely pair up with the males; only half of the newly-formed couples were allowed to stay together, though, and the unfortunate ones were reorganized into new couples. The end result, put simply, was that the naturally-paired finches did much better in the long run. The females were more eager to mate, and the males stayed faithful to their winged wives.
They key point of the experiment is that finches that found love — and were allowed to embrace it — gave birth to stronger offspring, likely because they worked together to care for the newborns. Those forced into marriage didn’t fare nearly as well; the survival rate of their offspring was 37 percent lower, and some chicks didn’t even make it past the two-day mark. It would seem, then, that the lesson here is to let love run its course — even if it’s for something as simple as a bird.
