Amanda de Almeida Monte

Learning in tropical hummingbirds 
Learning in birds was a convergent event that happened, as far as we know, only three times in the group: in oscine birds, parrots and hummingbirds. The discovery of nucleus related with learning in hummingbirds is recent and it was described only for a few species, thus little is known about learning in hummingbirds. Different species of humming birds present different strategies of communication; we have since non-vocal species that uses wing and tail’s sounds to communicate themselves until species which males use sophisticated songs to attract females in a vocal competition (lek behavior). We expect that the comparison of the neuroanatomy of species with different strategies of communication will provide us data to clarify the understanding about learning in hummingbirds.