Do females prefer unfamiliar sons of their foster parents? (with Dr. Wolfgang Forstmeier)

From EESwiki

It is widely believed that individual differences in mating preferences partly result from sexual imprinting on the phenotype of the parents. Surprisingly, however, this belief has hardly ever been tested. While it is well established that sexual imprinting is important for offspring to recognize their species as well as the sexes, imprinting beyond this function of categorizing has been shown only once, namely in humans: the husbands of women that grew up in a foster family were found to resemble the women’s foster fathers. We want to test whether this is also the case in zebra finches, by releasing females (that had been cross-fostered as eggs) into aviaries together with (1) unfamiliar sons of their foster parents and (2) randomly selected unrelated males. If imprinting plays a role, females should preferentially end up paired with the former type of males, as these resemble their foster fathers in all genetically heritable traits. The experiment will mainly involve observation of pair-bonding behaviour of colour-ringed individuals.