Some of the media reports on our recently published paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society (Biological Sciences), which showed that female parrot finches can and do adjust the sex of their offspring to adaptively match them to the expected quality of the rearing environment. In particular, females placed in poor dietary environments overproduced sons (despite no changes in their own condition and health), presumably because malnourished sons are much more likely to survive than daughters in poor conditions.
Boy or Girl? Mother can control outcome – Discovery News
Finches choose chicks’ gender – News 24
Mother finches control gender outcome – ABC News
Boy or girl? Mother can control outcome, study of birds finds – NBC News
