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Bird song has historically been characterized as a primarily male behavior that evolves through sexual selection pressures involved in mate attraction. More recently, researchers showed that female song is far more prevalent in songbirds than previously thought, raising new questions about how other social functions of birdsong and sexual selection pressures on females might affect song evolution. Certain breeding systems, particularly cooperative breeding, are hypothesized to change social dynamics and sexual selection pressures on males and females and may thus influence song evolution in both. Here, we construct a large-scale database synthesizing species-level information on the presence of female song, the characteristics of presumably male song, social variables, and breeding systems, and we perform comparative phylogenetic analyses. Our results suggest that cooperative breeding and female song co-occur significantly more than expected and exhibit co-evolutionary dynamics; in particular, cooperative breeding appears to decrease the likelihood that female song is lost. Notably, we find evidence that these trends might be linked to certain social features associated with cooperative breeding, including social bond stability, but not others, such as increased group size. In addition, we observe that song repertoire size appears to evolve more slowly in cooperative breeding lineages. Overall, our findings demonstrate that cooperative breeding may have complex and sex-specific effects on song evolution, maintaining female song while slowing the rate of male song elaboration, suggesting that song in cooperatively breeding species could function in ways that differ from the traditional mate-attraction paradigm and that lesser-studied functions of songs may be evolutionarily consequential. 

Environmental stress, especially during development, can cause important phenotypic changes in individuals. In songbirds, these stress-induced changes have been shown to include impaired learning of song and reduced song complexity in several species. Typically, developmental stress has been studied in terms of individual variation within a population; however, birdsong, a culturally transmitted trait, may undergo relatively rapid changes if widespread learning impairment results from population-level environmental stress, and these changes could potentially be amplified if affected individuals become the song tutors for future generations. We thus hypothesize that ecosystem-wide stressors may cause population-level changes to birdsong. Here, we use publicly available birdsong recordings to determine whether song differences were evident after an abnormal and severe 2016 drought in western New York State. We analyzed birdsong recordings of two species, the Dark-eyed Junco (Junco hyemalis) and the Song Sparrow (Melospiza melodia), recorded between 2006–2020 in the drought-affected region and, for comparison, in two nearby regions less affected by the drought. The population-level song features of the species with more complex songs (Song Sparrow) changed in the drought area after 2016, but not in the control area. In the species with a more simple song (Dark-eyed Junco), we detected song changes in both regions, suggesting that the drought did not have an outsized effect on song in this species. These findings support a more nuanced hypothesis that stress-induced deficits may disproportionately affect species with songs that are more difficult to learn. These conclusions are tempered by the relatively sparse recording availability from years prior to 2016, but we predict that future longitudinal studies of song evolution in natural populations will be more tractable given the nearly exponential increase in the number of song recordings deposited in public repositories in recent years, making this experimental design a useful framework for future studies. 

Four zebra finches in a closed research colony presented with variable clinical signs, including masses, skin lesions,shivering, and/or ruffled feathers. These birds were not responsive to treatment efforts; 3 died and one was euthanized. All4 were submitted for necropsy to determine the cause of the clinical signs. Gross necropsy and histopathologic findings fromall birds resulted in a diagnosis of round cell neoplasia in multiple organs, including the skin, liver, kidney, and reproductivetract, with intranuclear inclusion bodies in the neoplastic cells. In all 4 cases, immunohistochemical staining showed strongimmunoreactivity for CD3 in 70% to 80% of the neoplastic round cells, with a relatively small subset that were immunopositivefor Pax5. These findings supported a diagnosis of T-cell lymphoma. Frozen liver tissue from one case was submittedfor next-generation sequencing (NGS), which revealed viral RNA with 100% sequence homology to canary polyomavirusstrain 34639 that had originally been identified in a European goldfinch. Formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded scrolls fromanother case were also submitted for NGS, which revealed viral RNA with 97.2% sequence homology to canary polyomavirusstrain 37273 that had originally been identified in a canary. To localize the virus in situ, RNAscope hybridizationwas performed using a probe designed to target the VP1 gene of the sequenced virus in frozen liver tissue. In all 4 cases,disseminated and robust hybridization signals were detected in neoplastic cells. These findings indicate that polyomaviruseshave the potential to be oncogenic in zebra finches.