Only male finches sing, and the song is an important reproductive signal to the females.
Dr Fessl said it might be possible in the case of the Mangrove Finches to sterilise their nests.
It's a lot of work but with the Mangrove Finches, it is feasible.
This is where the zebra finches came in: how early and accurately could longer telomeres predict a longer life?
There had been an "amazing rise in small finches", Mr Bashford told Today.
The birds taken include Mexican house finches, green singing finches, java sparrows, Bengalese finches, diamond doves, painted finches and waxbills.
Wild finches, meanwhile, have snakes and birds of prey to worry about.
Fire crews were called to the blaze at The Lodge at Great Finches Farm, near the Dukes Head roundabout at 00:45 BST on Saturday.
Lake Malawi is a UNESCO World Heritage site and UNESCO says the lake's importance for studying the evolution of fish is comparable with finches in the Galapagos Islands.
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The giant tortoises, mockingbirds and finches varied from island to island, and this became clearer to Darwin after London Zoo's bird expert John Gould analysed his finches in January 1837.
That makes sense because previous work has shown that skinny female zebra finches are less likely to survive and reproduce than skinny males so when resources are poor, parents should prefer to produce sons.
The finches of the Galapagos, known as Darwin's finches, are the best known example, a single ancestral species from South America having given rise to 15 specialized forms in just the last two million years.
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But before you rush out to get your telomeres stretched - were such a process possible - it is worth pointing out that the creatures they have been working with are not humans but altogether shorter-lived zebra finches.
Using informed but clear language, she guides the reader through Darwin's own encounters with giant tortoises, iguanas and finches on these islands in the 1830s that led him, years later, to formulate his theories about the origin and evolution of species.
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