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Birds have a rich vocal repertoire that they use to communicate with their peers, but behavioral ecologist Mylene Mariette is more interested in the calls they make when they are seemingly alone.
While working as a researcher at Deakin University in Australia, Mariette had planted microphones in the nests of captive zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) to study how male-female pairs coordinate their parenting efforts. One day in 2014, she noticed that “sometimes one parent would produce a very different call when it was incubating by itself,” Mariette recalls, which led her to wonder “whether it was communicating with the embryos, because they were the only audience there.”
We know a lot about what happens before the eggs are laid and when they hatch, but in the middle, there's actually not a lot known.
The cry she overheard—a form of vocal ...
