Nature versus nurture — better looking birds have healthier babies

A female great tits’ (Parus major) appearance is shown to signal healthy attributes in offspring in a paper in BioMed Central’s open access journal Frontiers in Zoology. The black stripe across her breast and white patches on her cheeks correlate to a chick’s weight at two weeks and immune strength respectively — though the former seems to signal a genetic benefit and the latter can affect an «adopted» chick’s health, suggesting nurture is involved.

Fuente : http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/bc-…