Consider the zebra finch: The little gray Australian birds sometimes sing to their offspring while their young are still encased within eggs. Prenatal zebra finch chicks that hear their parents’ songs grow up to be, well, different from the other birds. To that end, they artificially incubated 166 zebra finch eggs at the same temperature, close to 100 degrees. If the birds heard the incubation calls, they seemed better equipped to live in hotter habitats. But where rats or mice might mimic human behaviors such as addiction, zebra finches fill a slightly different role.

Source: Washington Post August 19, 2016 08:54 UTC