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ddcmj519UID: 176326

Parasitology 寄生虫学
The song does not remain the sameMar 19th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Birdsong reveals the past as well as the present
LIKE many people, birds sing to show off 炫耀卖弄. Singing demands neurological神经病学的 sophistication and physical stamina耐力 and is thus （这顺序，赞。比我的thus is 有涵养。。）a good signal of what fine mates (and bad opponents) they would make. (sth demands ... and is thus a good ...)

A recent paper in Behavioral Ecology, though 等于however, goes one step further. It suggests that singing not only demonstrates how healthy a bird is, but （also 省略）how healthy it was. In avians, as in humans, the effects of childhood ailments小病 can linger into继续存留至 adult life. And that shows up in their song.

The paper’s authors, Linda Bischoff of the University of Bern in Switzerland and her colleagues, looked at great tits山雀科（还有各种其他意思。。） nesting in boxes in a Swiss forest. As the birds’ eggs started to hatch, they removed both the nestlings and the nests from the boxes. They microwaved the nests to kill any parasites and then returned both nests and nestlings. Then they infested 骚扰？half the nests with 60 hen fleas each.

Despite their name莫名。。, hen fleas are happy to suck blood from other birds. But they do not (as, for example, lice do) live on their hosts continually. Once a bird fledges, therefore, it leaves its parasites behind.脱毛避免跳蚤。嗯。。

Altogether, Dr Bischoff and her colleagues studied 22 males over the course of six years. Thirteen of these birds came from infested nests and 9 from nests that were free of parasites. They tracked these males, recorded their songs and monitored their behaviour. 小短句的排比用法

Their first observation was that the songs of those males （that had suffered fleas in early life ）were a third shorter than those sung by the others. The once-infested were also less quick off the mark 不失时机的when the time came to sing. Male great tits respond to the calls of other males by calling back rapidly, and thus overlapping部分重叠 the incoming call with their own. By playing recordings of calls to the males they were monitoring, the team found that those which had been flea-free managed to overlap with almost two-thirds of the outsider’s call, whereas the others managed to cover小词活用 less than half of it.

These discoveries complement those of Karen Spencer at Bristol University. Her work revealed that males who did not get enough food as nestlings have a smaller range of songs. They do not, though, sing less or fail to react rapidly to encroaching入侵 opponents. That suggests hunger and parasites affect song in different ways—a fact that tits are, no doubt, acutely aware of when they size each other up. size up估计，判断。
对比出真相。

ddcmj519UID: 176326

sum 一下。
发现俺老是会的单词看不懂意思。。短语积累太差。。
show off
quick off the mark
size up.

ddcmj519UID: 176326

额。。貌似还是距离认真有一截。。
还是选的文太easy了。。。。

米饭袜子UID: 2532172

TT蹲在地板上的米饭来顶~