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Liza Gross\/Courtesy Public Library of Science<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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Recent research has shown that zebra finches sing differently when drunk, but not whether they know enough of the lyrics to get through \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Stop Believin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I Will Survive.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
<\/span><\/p>\n Liza Gross\/Courtesy Public Library of Science<\/p>\n<\/p>\n If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve ever listened to karaoke at a bar, you know that drinking can affect how well someone can sing. Christopher Olson and his colleagues at Oregon Health and Science University recently set out to find if the same was true for birds, specifically zebra finches.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We just showed up in the morning and mixed a little bit of juice with 6 percent alcohol, and put it in their water bottles and put it in the cages,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Olson told All Things Considered<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcs Arun Rath. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153At first we were thinking that they wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t drink on their own because, you know, a lot of animals just won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t touch the stuff. But they seem to tolerate it pretty well and be somewhat willing to consume it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n The finches long have been used as a model to study human vocal learning, or how people learn to communicate using language, Olson said. Obviously, alcohol affects human speech, so Olson and his team checked for similar problems with the birds.<\/p>\n The blood-alcohol levels achieved \u00e2\u20ac\u201d .05 to .08 percent \u00e2\u20ac\u201d would be laughed off by many college students, but because birds metabolize alcohol differently it was plenty to produce the effects the scientists were looking for.<\/p>\n Listen to the audio, and you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll hear that the finches\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 song gets a bit quieter and just a little slurred, or as Olson puts it, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a bit less organized in their sound production\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201d like a roommate calling from a bar to get a ride home.<\/p>\n In the future, Olson wants to find out whether alcohol affects not just how birds sing, but how they learn new songs \u00e2\u20ac\u201d like a roommate partying so late they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re still drunk at class the next morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" i i Recent research has shown that zebra finches sing differently when drunk, but not whether they know enough of the lyrics to get through \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Stop Believin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I Will Survive.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Liza Gross\/Courtesy Public Library of Science hide caption itoggle caption Liza Gross\/Courtesy Public Library of Science Recent research has shown that zebra […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}