By Susan Milius
From Burlington, Vt., at a meeting of the Animal Behavior Society
The troubles of parents who don’t communicate well take a toll on their offspring—even among cockatiels.
That’s the conclusion of work by Rebecca Fox, now of the University of Nevada in Reno.
She let captive cockatiels choose mates and gauged how well matched each pair was, according to a “personality” test of cockatiel traits. Some birds seemed compatible, and others ended up very dissimilar. Nine of the pairs laid eggs and raised young, and Fox reported that the better-matched pairs tended to fledge more chicks.