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Updated: Jun 21, 2025

Operant Conditioning Task to Measure Song Preference in Zebra Finches
Published on: December 26, 2019
Courtship behavior: Resurrecting an undead song
1Department of Biological Sciences and Graduate Program in Neurobiology and Behavior, Box 2432, Sherman Fairchild Center for the Life Sciences, 1212 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027, USA.
Abstract:
The fly Drosophila yakuba has lost an ancestral component of the male courtship song: this is due to ontogenetic death of effector neurons in the ventral nerve cord, a result of the D. yakuba sex-determining gene dsx producing a male isoform, dsxM, with cell-death-promoting activity similar to that of the female isoform, dsxF, in D. melanogaster.
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