Chemical and ethological characterization of volatiles implicated in behavioural responses of songbird hatchlings to their parents’ scent

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There is increasing evidence that olfaction plays a hitherto neglected role in the social behaviour of songbirds, including parent-offspring interaction. In zebra finches, Caspers and colleagues (2017) found out that freshly hatched chicks beg longer when stimulated with their parental odour compared with the odour from an unfamiliar adult, indicating that chicks recognise their parents’ scent from hatching on. Recent pilot studies led to the conclusion that zebra finch chicks do not only evince a begging behaviour to the parental scent, but also to specific compounds of the body odour of any adult breeding zebra finch. It still remains unknown, however, which kind of chemical information elicits the chicks’ stereotypical begging behaviour. In the proposed project, we aim to identify and characterize these behaviourally active compounds.