Julia Self

They have a really strong opinion.

It doesn't really matter what others are doing.

You know, in my own life, if I don't care so much, if I, you know, don't care, it's a coin toss in terms of what I like.

I'm probably more likely to copy what other people are doing than if I'm really convicted, in my opinion.

And so when I think about it in terms of humans, it makes a lot more sense than when we just think about it in terms of birds.

Yes, this is really exciting.

So in zebra finches, the males select and deposit the majority of the nest material.

And for a long time, we've referred to the male bird as the primary builder.

And we thought that he did almost everything.

But there's new research coming from our lab led by Dr. Ben Whitaker that shows that actually the females are doing a lot more than we thought.

And so in my experiment, we examined the male behavior because of previous research.

But I'm excited to see the females' role in nest building.

being more examined here in the future.

So sometimes.

So in my experiment, there was one pair of birds, a male and a female, where the female just deposited all the string.

And that was really unusual.

And I told my colleague and, you know, combined with their own observations, they decided to examine this question because for a long time we thought, you know, the male selects and deposits, the female might rearrange.

And now we're seeing the females doing a lot more.

Some of them deposit, some of them don't deposit at all, some a lot.

And so