Scientists just recently decided to study female birds. What they found astounded them.
Did you know female birds can sing? That might sound like a simple statement—an obvious statement—but just a little over a decade ago, most scientists viewed birdsong as trait that belonged nearly exclusively to male birds. This is just one of many ways scientists have historically short-changed female birds, researchers argue in a new study published in the International Journal of Avian Science. “People tend to have an unconscious bias towards male birds, and that’s often because they’re brighter and easier to identify,” says lead author Joanna Wu, an ornithologist and ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Of course, in some species, such as crows, females and males are indistinguishable at a glance, making studying differences between the sexes even more difficult. These biases echo similar ones in human studies and could impact efforts to save species from threats like climate change and habitat destruction. “Without females, you’re really missing a large part of the population, and a pretty important part of the population for survival,” says Karan Odom, a behavior ecologist at the University of the Pacific, who was not involved in the new study.
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A bro-bias? I can't imagine why. I sure hope that's not happened in other fields of research.
