Role of sexual imprinting in assortative mating and premating isolation in Darwin’s finches

Significance It is important to preserve the potential for future speciation because global biodiversity is being rapidly degraded. A key question is how incipient species become reproductively isolated from each other. Here we provide evidence that two species of Darwin’s finches choose mates on the basis of learning morphological features of their parents and possibly from inherited preferences. The evidence for imprinting is stronger in sons...