While songbirds are adored for their sweet tones, drummers might be starting to get some of the spotlight.
Woodpeckers, which don’t sing but do drum on trees, have Brain regions similar to songbirds’ are found in the brainResearchers report September 20th PLOS Biology. This is a surprising finding, as songbirds use these areas to their advantage. Learn their songs at an early age, yet it’s not clear if woodpeckers learn their drum beats (SN: 9/16/21). This suggests that singing and drumming are shared evolutionary origins, regardless of whether the woodpeckers do it.
Rare in the animal kingdom is the ability to learn vocalizations from listening to them. Songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds are vocal learners. They have developed certain nerve cells called nuclei, which control this ability. Animals that don’t learn vocally are thought to lack these brain features.
While it’s commonly assumed that other birds don’t have these nuclei, “there’s thousands of birds in the world,” says Matthew Fuxjager, a biologist at Brown University in Providence, R.I. “While we say these brain regions only exist in these small groups of species, nobody’s really looked in a lot of these other taxa.”
Fuxjager and his colleagues examined the noggins of several birds that don’t learn vocally to check if they really did lack these brain nuclei. They used molecular probes and checked the brains of bird brains for the presence of a gene called parvalbuminA marker of vocal learning nuclei, the. Many of the birds, including penguins and flamingos, came up short, but there was one exception — male and female woodpeckers, which had three spots in their brains with high parvalbumin activity.
Though woodpeckers don’t sing, they do perform a rapid drumming on trees and house gutters to defend their territories or find mates. This drumming differs from the drilling that birds use to search for food. Fuxjager was instantly intrigued when the team discovered brain nuclei that looked similar to songbirds found in woodpeckers. “I thought right away it’s probably related to drumming,” he says.
Researchers subjected downy Woodpeckers to (Dryobates pubescens() In the wild to audio recordings. The birds responded aggressively to this faux territorial invasion by drumming. They were captured and euthanized in order to have their brain activity tested. The drummers activated the same areas identified in lab tests.
While the brains for bird singers and drummers are distinct, similarities in the analyzed regions suggest a common origin. “It suggests that there are common themes about how you develop these complex behaviors,” says Bradley Colquitt, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz who was not involved in the study. Colquitt believes that these neural circuits were formed from an ancestral control circuit for movement.
“Birdsong is basically the brain controlling muscles in a vocal organ called the syrinx,” Fuxjager says. These sophisticated movements are very similar to drumming’s head-and-neck movements.
The team is currently investigating the question of whether drumming is learned from birdsong. Future work will also look at how woodpeckers’ brains are wired, how these nuclei control drumming and how the brain regions’ role in drumming evolved across woodpecker species, Fuxjager says.
This new study “uncovers another species that we can add to our comparative efforts” to better understand how complex behaviors evolve, Colquitt says. “It is a preview into potentially exciting evolutionary neurobiology.” Now that woodpeckers have joined the band of important musical birds, it looks like the drummers may soon get their chance to shine.
