Behavioral Ecology Blog

So I obviously have to cover this story- as it comes from a friend and labmate- Lauryn Benedict.  A Nature News piece just covered the results (published: Benedict, L. Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. doi: 10.1007/s00265-007-0524-x (2007). ) of a part of her thesis.  Anyway, here is a part of the story!

Birds that sing in harmonious duets with one another have always been considered monogamous partners, with the singing thought to help in building faithful relationships. Now, research has shown at least that one such species sleeps around.

Lauryn Benedict of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, studied duetting California towhees (Pipilo crissalis). She found that although female birds sang with the same male every day, more than one-quarter of their chicks were not fathered by her ‘husband’.

So this is cool, surprising to the (in retrospect, nieve) ornithologist, Behavioral Ecologist type that considered duetting (when pairbonded birds sing in a coordinated fashion) to be a good predictor of monogamy.. Instead, just like most birds they are socially monogamous, but have a lot of EPC’s.