During FinchMe’s beginnings, I thought the website could get by with just a community of breeders exchanging their opinions with their breeding methods for their finches.  But with the last article I wrote, I realized that the website can very well use a more scientific approach in breeding by relying on scientific research as well. I’ve done a little digging of my own, and I found one more study that is related to our beloved zebra finches.

Did you know that female zebra finches also go with the crowd in choosing their potential mate? That’s right, the celebrity status we attribute to other human beings are also being practiced by our birds. In this study I found, males already chosen by other females are more attractive to other females than the regular single males. The author of the article describes this phenomenon as cultural, rather than genetic, and may or may not be observed for a given colony of zebras. I’ve been asking myself what this could mean to our pet birds, and I arrived at this conclusion: if you have a female zebra which is very hard to pair but which you would really like to breed probably because it is high mutation, there is a much higher probability that it will mate with a male zebra which is already paired with another female. Does that make sense? This same principle applied to human relationships would be very terrible, but of course some actually do practice it.

The study also has another angle wherein female zebras dislike or do not have much preference over males that live together. Now that certainly makes more sense.

Source:
Copycat mating for the birds