SAT Reading & Writing · Command of Evidence (textual)
Female superb fairy-wrens sing a distinctive call while incubating their eggs, and their nestlings later incorporate an element of that…
Female superb fairy-wrens sing a distinctive call while incubating their eggs, and their nestlings later incorporate an element of that learned call into their own begging calls after hatching. A biologist claims this prenatal learning provides a foolproof way for parent birds to detect and reject brood-parasitic cuckoo chicks that don't belong in the nest. Which finding would most directly complicate this claim?
Answer and explanation
Answer: D: Cuckoo nestlings that fail to match the learned call element are not always rejected by the parent birds, and some parasitic chicks are still successfully raised despite an imperfect match.
"Foolproof" is an absolute claim, and D directly supplies a counterexample: cases where the defense mechanism fails to result in rejection despite an imperfect signal match. A restates a fact already given in the setup instead of testing the "foolproof" claim. C is a basic behavioral fact that doesn't address detection accuracy. B provides unrelated background about the broader phenomenon of brood parasitism.
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