Early life nutritional stress affects song learning but not underlying neural circuitry in zebra finches.

Abstract

Early life stress negatively impacts behavior and underlying neural circuitry across species. The present study investigated the effects of nutritional stress (NS), which increases parental foraging, on song quality in males, song preferences in females, and the size and number of cells in song and auditory regions of the zebra finch brain. We hypothesized that NS would decrease song quality in males and decrease preference for high quality song in females. Furthermore, we predicted that NS would reduce the size of song nuclei and decrease the number of cells in song and auditory regions. In males, NS decreased the number of syllable types (a measure of song complexity), decreased the number of high notes and flat notes, and increased the number of noisy notes, but had no effect on song rate or song length. In females, NS reduced preferences for high quality song. Despite these behavioral effects, there were no effects of NS on song and auditory nuclei, although there were effects of age and sex. These results suggest that NS affects behavior in both males and females, but these effects are not attributable to the number of cells or size of song and auditory regions. Such findings add to our understanding of the effects of early life stress on behavior and cognition.

Variable ambient temperature promotes song learning and production in zebra finches

“…The repertoire size in the zebra finch has been shown to reflect early developmental stress. In some studies, song quality was affected by corticosterone treatment, food deprivation ( Spencer et al 2003 , 2005 ; Buyannemekh et al 2020 ), and brood size ( Tchernichovski and Nottebohm 1998 ; Gil et al 2006 ; Soma et al 2006 ). However, other studies ( Zann and Cash 2008 ; Brumm et al 2009 ; Ritschard and Brumm 2012 ; Kriengwatana et al 2014 ) found no effect of food restriction during development on the syllable repertoire size in zebra finches.…”