Evolution News - And Then There Was One

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Common Redpoll (Male)

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Common Redpoll (Female/Immature)

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Common Redpoll (Adult male)

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Common Redpoll (Adult male)

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Common Redpoll (Female/Immature)

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Hoary Redpoll (Adult male)

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Hoary Redpoll (Female/Immature)

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Hoary Redpoll (Female/Immature)

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Hoary Redpoll (Adult male)

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Hoary Redpoll (Adult male)

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Lesser Redpoll (Female/Immature)

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Lesser Redpoll

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Lesser Redpoll

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Lesser Redpoll (Female/Immature)

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Lesser Redpoll (Female/Immature)

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Common arctic finches are all the same species | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | University of Colorado Boulder

The Redpoll is a Holarctic finch which makes occasional forays south, so, while never a common bird outside its normal range, it is a favourite of birdwatchers and ornithologists. The problem was that the range of morphologies within a species, with considerable overlap, made it very difficult to distinguish between then in the field, so birdwatchers were never sure which species or subspecies they had actually seen or whether they were really different species or subspecies.

Now, work by researchers from University of Colorado, Boulder, has finally settled the question about their taxonomic status. Detailed DNA analysis has shown that they are in fact the same species, which is highly variable due to the control of a 'supergene' which produces a range of different morphologies - the usual basis for taxonomic classification prior to the technology which enables DNA to be analysed in sufficient detail.

Evolution News - Amazon Rainforest Birds Evolving Due to Climate Change

Above the Amazon rainforest canopy where birds have become smaller and their wings have become longer over several generations, indicating a response to the shifting environmental conditions that may include new physiological or nutritional challenges.

Photo credit: Vitek Jirinec, LSU

Amazon Rainforest Birds’ Bodies Transform Due to Climate Change

A study by a combined team from the USA, Brazil and Portugal, led by Vitek Jirinec of Louisiana State University's School of Renewable Natural Resources, has found evidence that climate change is causing birds of the Amazon Rainforest to evolve smaller bodies and longer wings, even in the areas of the forest where human activity is minimal.

They arrived at this conclusion by examining data from measuring over 15,000 birds over a period of 40 years from a wide range of sites. Over that time the body mass of individuals has reduced by about 2% per decade, so that a bird species with an average body weight of 30 grams in 1980 would now have an average weight of 27.6 grams. These changes are not confined to specific areas, so eliminating local factors. In other words, the changes are being produced by a pervasive environmental change.

The team have published their findings, open access a few days ago, in Science Advances.

These birds don’t vary that much in size. They are fairly fine-tuned, so when everyone in the population is a couple of grams smaller, it’s significant.

This is undoubtedly happening all over and probably not just with birds...If you look out your window, and consider what you’re seeing out there, the conditions are not what they were 40 years ago and it’s very likely plants and animals are responding to those changes as well. We have this idea that the things we see are fixed in time; but if these birds aren’t fixed in time, that may not be true.

Professor Philip Stouffer, co-author
Lee F. Mason Professor
School of Renewable Natural Resources
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

Where there was a significant difference, however, was related to the level in the forest that the species normally inhabits, from the forest floor to the canopy. The change was most marked in those which occupy the higher levels, where climate change has had the biggest impact making it drier and hotter. This has created an environment which favour lighter bodies with longer wings, both of which improve flight efficiency so making it easier to tolerate higher temperatures.

In the abstract to their open access paper, published in Science Advances, the authors say:

Abstract

Warming from climate change is expected to reduce body size of endotherms, but studies from temperate systems have produced equivocal results. Over four decades, we collected morphometric data on a nonmigratory understory bird community within Amazonian primary rainforest that is experiencing increasingly extreme climate. All 77

species showed lower mean mass since the early 1980s—nearly half with 95% confidence. A third of species concomitantly increased wing length, driving a decrease in mass:wing ratio for 69% of species. Seasonal precipitation patterns were generally better than temperature at explaining morphological variation. Short-term climatic conditions affected all metrics, but time trends in wing and mass:wing remained robust even after controlling for annual seasonal conditions. We attribute these results to pressures to increase resource economy under warming. Both seasonal and long-term morphological shifts suggest response to climate change and highlight its pervasive consequences, even in the heart of the world’s largest rainforest.

Jirinec Vitek; Burner Ryan C.; Amaral Bruna R.; Bierregaard Richard O.; Fernández-Arellano Gilberto; Hernández-Palma Angélica; Johnson Erik I.; Lovejoy Thomas E.; Powell Luke L.; Rutt Cameron L.; Wolfe Jared D.; Stouffer Philip C (2021)
Morphological consequences of climate change for resident birds in intact Amazonian rainforest
Science Advances 7(46); eabk1743. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abk1743

Copyright: 2021 The authors. Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0)

This is a clear example, not only of the effects of climate change but of how significant environmental change can influence the evolution of species as the environment selects for those characteristics which give greater fitness. It's a beautiful example of how science quite incidentally and with no intention on the part of the authors to do so, casually refutes Creationism by revealing the facts and so confirming once gain how evolution by natural selection works in practice. Significant morphological changes have occurred in these species over a defined time period and that change is proportional to the impact of a pervasive, measurable environmental change in different ecological niches.

Unintelligent Design News - Another Arms Race - Between Birds

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The common cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other bird species, burdening these hosts with the task of raising its young.

Photo by Olda Mikulica

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Yellow warblers sometimes abandon their nests when a cowbird lays an egg in them. Another strategy involves building a new nest on top of the old one, sealing off the parasitic egg.

Photo by Pookie Fugglestein

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Researchers report that brood parasites, like this common cuckoo, top, have larger eyes than the birds they target – beyond the difference expected as a result of their larger body size. Common cuckoos will parasitize the nests of European robins, bottom left, but not those of European bee-eaters, bottom right.

Photos by Tomas Grim

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The great reed warbler
sometimes has its nest parasitized by cuckoos.

Photo by Olda Mikulica

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An adult common redstart feeds a parasitic cuckoo chick in its nest.

Photo by Tomas Grim

Birds' eye size offers clues to coevolutionary arms race between brood parasites, hosts | Illinois

The existence of arms races is about as good evidence as you can get that there is no intelligence behind life on Earth. After all, what single intelligent entity would indulge in an ultimately futile competition with itself where a solution to a problem is then turned around into another problem to be solved and so ad infinitum, in a futile, never-ending cycle of redesign for no ultimate purpose save possibly to make more parasites?

And this example of one such arms races is a good example. As so often with these arms races, it starts off with one species becoming an obligate parasite on another - and obligate parasites are themselves more evidence of the lack of intelligence since it will inevitably lead to yet another arms race as the parasitised species develops ways to resist or mitigate the parasite and the parasite has to counter those measures or become extinct. Any half-decent biologist will understand this, so it shouldn't be beyond the comprehension of an intelligent designer god.

And let's remind ourselves that Creationism's putative designer god is also normally the supposedly omniscient Abrahamic god of Christianity, Islam and Judaism who should therefore have foreseen that a pointless and ultimately futile arms race would ensue when it allegedly designed an obligate parasite.

Unintelligent Designer News - How Darwin's Finches Are (Still) Making a Fool of Creationists.

Small tree finch Camarhynchus parvulus with naris damage caused by larvae of the avian vampire fly, Philornis downsi.

Photo: Dr Katharina Peters, Flinders University.

How Galápagos finches evade a parasitic fly – News

It's always fun when Creationist frauds are exposed and their credulous dupes shown to be... well... credulous dupes (to be kind). It's even more delicious when the scientists unwittingly doing it are using those iconic birds, Darwin's finches, or more correctly, Galápagos finches of the genus Camarhynchus.

The story begins back in the 1960s when the parasitic avian vampire fly (Philornis downsi) was accidentally introduced onto one island in the Galápagos group. Females of this species lay their eggs in the nests of certain species of bird and the larvae feed on the blood and tissues of the young. They are especially attracted to the ears and nostrils of the chicks and cause distortions and deformities in those which survive to adulthood. 50-100% of a brood can be lost to an attack. After spending 10 days eating the chicks, the fly larvae then pupate in the base of the nest and emerge as adult 16 days later to begin the cycle again.

As a result of this newly-introduced predation, 10 species of Darwin's finches are now under sever threat of extinction so there is intense selection pressure on the birds to evolve strategies for resisting or avoiding this predation. There is similar selection pressure on the flies to continue their predation by selecting hosts with the lowest ability to avoid predation.

In other words, the introduction of these parasites has created a new host-parasite dynamic and the conditions for evolution to operate under selection pressure, so creating a 'natural' laboratory for studying how evolution works in practice. It also makes it possible to test out predictions made by the TOE. This has been closely monitored and investigated by teams of scientists from Flinders University.

From a Flinders University news release:

Evolution News - Great Tits Evolving to Suit City Living

Great tit, Parus major, adapting to city life

Photo: Caroline Isaksson

A stressful life in the city affects birds' genes | Lund University

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given what we know of the way the environment drives evolution, a group of researchers from Lund University, Sweden, have found that the genome of the common European great tit, Parus major, living in European cities is different to those living in the countryside. What was surprising perhaps, was the very clear evidence of this urban selection in a widespread but genetically very similar European population.

This is probably true for all European cities. Whether Milan, Malmö or Madrid the genetic changes were similar, showing a high degree of convergence on the same solutions to the same environmental factors. At least, this was true for the diverse selection of cities on which the team chose to concentrate their efforts.

They found that the changes involved genes that regulate cognition, aggression and circadian rhythms, all of which are important in a high-stress environment like a city with

This indicates that these behaviours, and cognition, are very important in order to live in urban environments with a lot of stress in the form of noise pollution, lights at night, air pollution and constant proximity to people.

We have analysed more than half a million single-nucleotide polymorphisms (snips) spread over the entire genome. There were a handful of genes that had clearly changed in response to the urban environment.

That we see such a clear urban selection across the board, in an otherwise genetically similar European great tit, is surprising.

Caroline Isaksson, Lead author
Senior Lecturer
Department of Biology
Lund University, Lund, Sweden

high levels of pollution, night-time lighting, noise and the proximity to people.

A total of, 192 great tits were examined from populations in Malmö, Gothenburg, Madrid, Munich, Paris, Barcelona, Glasgow, Lisbon and Milan. For each urban population, there was a control group of great tits living on a nearby rural environment. Blood samples have been taken from all of the birds and analysed genetically.

The research is published, open access in the journal, Nature Communications:

Abstract

Urbanisation is increasing worldwide, and there is now ample evidence of phenotypic changes in wild organisms in response to this novel environment. Yet, the genetic changes and genomic architecture underlying these adaptations are poorly understood. Here, we genotype 192 great tits (Parus major) from nine European cities, each paired with an adjacent rural site, to address this major knowledge gap in our understanding of wildlife urban adaptation. We find that a combination of polygenic allele frequency shifts and recurrent selective sweeps are associated with the adaptation of great tits to urban environments. While haplotypes

Evolution News - Great Tits Have Evolved Flexible Cultures

Great tits (Parus major) can change their culture to become more efficient

Great tits change their traditions for the better | University of Konstanz

How arrogant we once were, before science taught us humility!

When I was young, back in the 1950s, we assumed us humans were exceptional in so many ways that justified believing we must be a special creation with a special purpose, being blessed with so many unique abilities. Human exceptionalism justified so much about religion and our relationship with the rest of nature and the world, which we assumed had been created solely for our benefit to be used as we saw fit. There was even an account in our book of self-justificatory origin myths that related how and why everything was created this way - "And God gave Man dominion..."

But that was in the days before we knew any better. Now we know otherwise.

• We used to think we were the only 'thinking' beings, now we know that many other species can think and solve problems.
• We used to think we were the only beings with intelligence enough to make and use tools, now we know many other species also shape and use tools.
• We used to think we were the only beings with ethics and moral codes, now we know several other species are also empathetic and know the difference between right and wrong in context.
• We used to think we were the only beings with a sense of self, now we know many other species are self-aware and have a conceptual map of their environment with them at the centre of it.
• We used to think we were the only beings with cultures, now we know that other species also form cultures which they inherit from their parents and peers.

And, that latter assumption has just taken another blow with the news that a group of researchers at the University of Konstanz and Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior in Germany have found that birds are able to change their culture to become more efficient. As the University of Konstanz press release explains:

Evolution News - Rapid Evolution by Genetic Shuffling

Iberá Seedeater, Sporophila iberaensis

Endangered songbird challenging assumptions about evolution | Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine | University of Colorado Boulder

A group of researchers led by Sheela P. Turbek of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA have identified a rare form of evolution in a group of birds known collectively as the southern capuchino seedeaters. The process, known as genetic shuffling, had only been observed once before, in African in the cichlid fish of Lake Victoria and is believed to be behind the recent evolution of a new species, the Iberá Seedeater, Sporophila iberaensis.

In addition to speciation by gene shuffling - where a new species arises by recombining existing genes in a unique combination, this species of bird also illustrates how speciation can be maintained by pre-zygotic barriers to hybridization, that arise through natural selection because hybrids with intermediate characteristics may be at a disadvantage, having intermediate specialisations.

Evolution News - European Blackcaps Diverging in Plain View

Male blackcap, Sylvia atricapilla

Scientists attach geolocators to the backs of blackcaps to record the light intensity at any time of day. In this way, hiking trails can be precisely determined.

© Ben Porter

Variety in the migratory behavior of blackcaps | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Like the paper on the origins of East Asian peoples, in my last blog post, this one on the migration of the European warbler, the blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla), also shows how little makes sense in biology unless seen with an understanding of evolution and how it works. Supernatural ''explanations' actually explain nothing and have no predictive power because, when you add magic to any explanation, literally anything becomes possible and nothing is falsifiable.

This little bird is a favourite of mine if for no other reason that we had one spend two of the last three winters in our garden, feeding regularly at our bird feeders and fat balls (and that is a clue to their recent change of habit, which this paper records). Readers may recall I wrote about this just over 2 years ago, explaining the evolutionary significance of it.

Now this piece of work, led by Miriam Liedvogel of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, sets out to uncover some of the remaining mysteries surrounding blackcap migration.

How Birds Speciate - The North American Orioles

Bullock's Oriole, Icterus bullockii (male)

Photo credit: Kevin Cole Source: Wikipedia CC BY 2.0

Study: Oriole Hybridization Is a Dead End

The the Eurasian carrion crow/hooded crow complex, the North American Orioles are examples of allopatric speciation that has reached some sort of equilibrium where interbreeding is still possible, but there are indications that barriers to hybridization are arising within the two populations. As such, they make interesting examples of speciation in progress and an illustrate of one mechanism for speciation.

I have written before about how and why the carrion crow, Corvus corone, and the hooded crow, C. cornix, are regarded as different species even though they can and do interbreed to produce fertile hybrids - normally a sign that the interbreeding populations are at best subspecies. The decision to classify them as different species was based on the evidence that there is a degree of female sex-selection which favours the hooded crow plumage pattern, so the hybrids tend to be reproductively less successful so any zone of interbreeding remains narrow and needs to be replenished. In other words, hybridization is not leading to significant gene flow between the two species. This sex-selection behaviour is a partial barrier to hybridization.

Evolution News - How Long-Tailed Tits Avoid Incest

Long-tailed tit, Aegithalos caudatus

Source: ebird.org

Long-tailed tits avoid incest by recognising the calls of relatives | EurekAlert! Science News

The long-tailed tit, Aegithalos caudatus is one of my all-time favourite birds. And now they illustrate a fascinating aspect of evolution - how something evolved for one purpose can be co-opted and used for another. In this case, the constant twittering they make to maintain flock cohesion and to identify members of their extended family groups, is used to avoid incestuous breeding.

You can come across these lovely little birds in woods, especially in autumn and winter, when suddenly you realise the trees are alive with little twittering black, buff-orange and white birds, constantly on the go as they move through the trees foraging for small insects in groups of maybe a couple of dozen, constantly twittering and calling. Then, just as suddenly as they arrived, they're gone.

Unintelligent Design - Hummingbirds and Suboptimal Human Eyes

Male Broad-tailed hummingbird, Selasphorus platycercus

Photo Noah Whiteman
University of California-Berkeley

Wild hummingbirds see a broad range of colors humans can only imagine

One of the more idiotic and demonstrably false claims by intelligent [sic] design creationists is that the human eye is so perfectly designed that it must have been intelligently designed by magic. This claim is even hilariously repeated by spectacle-wearing Ken Ham of the disinformation site, Answers in Genesis, blissfully oblivious of the contradiction his vision-correcting spectacles betray.

However, a few minutes studying vision in other vertebrates will show that the human eye is actually fairly ordinary and unremarkable as vertebrate eyes go. It lacks the visual acuity of an eagle's eye for example, and now, as this study shows, we can see (sorry!) our eyes lack the colour vision of birds; in this case a broad-tailed hummingbirds, Selasphorus platycercus.

Cultural Evolution and Wood Pigeons

Common wood pigeon, Columba palumbus

I'm sitting in my garden enjoying a beautiful sunny summer day with a light breeze. About ten feet to my right is a tangle of buddleia and ceanothus with a vine and a wisteria twinging up through it, having outgrown their pergola. In the centre of this tangle is a wood pigeon's nest. A couple of wood pigeons are strutting about not six feet from me.

Outside my front door, in a tangle of Clematis montanum and making a right mess of my outside lamp and the ground beneath, is another wood pigeon's nest. The first clutch of young having flown about a week ago, they already seem to be sitting on a second clutch of two eggs. Always two and always one male and one female - a 'pigeon pair'.

According to the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), wood pigeons, Columba palumbus, are now competing with blue tits and blackbirds for the top spot as Britain's commonest garden bird. Something has changed radically in the behaviour of wood pigeons over the last ten to twenty years.

Creationism Goes off the Rails

Aldabran White-throated rail, Dryolimnas cuvieri subsp. aldabranus.

Photo credit: Charles J Sharp [CC BY-SA 4.0]

The bird that came back from the dead | UoP News

Here we have a very nice example of how evolution is 'directed' by the environment, and an example of how the Theory of Evolution has explanatory powers that creationism simply does not have. This example is of a flightless member of the rail family of birds that evolved not once but twice on the small Indian Ocean atoll of Aldabra.

Julian P Hume of the Bird Group, Department of Life Sciences, Natural History Museum, Tring, Herts, UK and David Martill of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK, have shown that the present day flightless white-throated rail of Aldabra has some strikingly similar features to an extinct flightless rail. The extinct rail inhabited the atoll until climate change caused the sea level to rise and cover the atoll about 136,000 years ago, exterminating all plant and animal life.

Evolution News - A Matter of Joined-Up Thinking

Buff-browed Foliage gleaner, Syndactyla rufosupercilita.

Photo credit: Ricardo O. de Oliveira
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The Cerrado once connected the Andes with the Atlantic Rainforest | AGÊNCIA FAPESP

Far from being, as creationists would have their duped believe, a theory in crisis, evolution is so well embedded as a fundamental science that no serious scientists even question it any more, that it can be used to settle debate about things like climate change and distribution of different biomes in the past.

An example of this is the paper in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution in which the distribution of a family of oven birds in the Amazon and Andean rain forests was used to show how and when these two rainforests were connected at times.

New Bird Shows How Species are Maintained

Newly-identified Cream-eyed bulbul, previously thought to be a variant of the Cream-vented bulbul.

Credit: Subir Shakya, Louisiana State University
Department of Biological Sciences

New Bird Species Discovered by LSU Researchers

A very nice example of how speciation between closely-related species occupying the same or overlapping ranges is maintained, is illustrated by the discovery of a new species of bird hiding in plain sight in Borneo.

Over most of its range, the Cream-vented bulbul, Pycnonotus simplex, a rather drab olive-brown bird, has white eyes but on the island of Borneo it was thought to have occurred in two forms; the locally more common red-eyed form and the 'normal' white-eyed form.

Now, after painstaking analysis of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of both red and white-eyed bulbuls and other related species, a team of researchers from Louisiana State University (LSU) led by PhD student, Subir Shakya, has shown that the white-eyed form on Borneo is a newly-identified species, genetically distinct from the red-eyed Borneo form and the white-eyed form found elsewhere. They have named this new species, Pycnonotus pseudosimplex.

Their paper was published a few days ago in the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club.

Evolution in Progress - Eurasian Blackcap

Male Blackcap, Sylvia atricapilla

Source

It's nice to be able to report on a recently-observed example of behavioural change in one of Britain's more tuneful warblers - the Eurasian blackcap - brought about by human activity.

When I was young, a popular ornithology trivia question was, what is the only resident British warbler? 'Resident' meaning non-migratory and remaining in Britain all year round.
The answer, found after hours of searching though my bird books, was the Dartford warbler, a very pretty little warbler found in southern England and believed to then be the only warbler to over-winter here.

That's now changed. As I witnessed last winter with one regularly coming to feed in our garden, and again a few days ago when I saw and heard one singing in a tree in my sister-in-law's garden, an increasing number of Blackcaps are now resident in Britain throughout winter, at least in Oxfordshire. There have also been numerous reports from other parts of the UK. This has led scientists to speculate that this could be the beginning of a speciation as the two populations become reproductively isolated.

Rapid Evolution of Barn Swallows

Barn swallow, Hirundo rustica

Barn swallows may indeed have evolved alongside humans

Barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) are one of only a handful of species that have co-evolved with humans but are not parasitic on us. This commensal evolution depended on the ecological niches we have provided during our own evolution and, in this case, as with House sparrows, particularly the social evolution of agriculture and settled dwellings on and in which to live. Barn swallows nest almost exclusively in man-made structures, hence their popular name.

Now researchers have tentatively establish when the species took up residence with humans and when they radiated relatively rapidly into the six regional subspecies now recognised.

Evolution News - Giant Mice Threaten Rare Seabirds

Tristan albatross Diomedea dabbenena

Gough Island restoration programme | RSPB

A very nice, even if worrying, example of evolution in progress was illustrated in a report by the RSPB on one of their programmes to protect the seabird population on remote South Atlantic Gough Island. The giant descendants of the house mice that were introduced accidentally to the island in the 19th century, have become predatory on the estimated more than eight million seabirds of twenty-three different species that nest there.

Gough Island is part of the UK Overseas Territory of Tristan da Cunha, and is the nest site of the critically endangered Tristan albatross, Diomedea dabbenena.

Birds of a Feather - New Species Evolve

Large cactus finch (Geospiza conirostris)

Study of Darwin's finches reveals that new species can develop in as little as two generations

Birds of a feather: U of T researchers discover Amazon bird to be rare hybrid species

This week we have a couple of examples of new species arising - that thing that creationists insist can't happen. The evolutionary process that created them was hybridisation which occurs very much faster than the more usual (at least in vertebrates - speciation by hybridisation is common in plants) divergence by a combination of genetic drift and natural selection. And in these cases, the species are birds.

The first is from those devil figures for creationists - Darwin's finches or Galapagos finches. This was originally reported and commented extensively upon last November and revealed an observed incidence of apparent speciation when a vagrant male appeared on the island of Daphne Major. This was much larger and had a larger, more robust beak than any of the other three species present on the island. It also sang with a different song.

Evolving Great Tits - In Our Back Gardens

Great tit, Parus major, on a garden feeder

Photo credit: Dennis van de Water, dvdwphotography.com

Evolution in your back garden—great tits may be adapting their beaks to birdfeeders.

Great tits are evolving, just up the road from where I live!

Not ten minutes drive from where I sit writing this blog-post is probably the most intensely studied piece of woodland in the world, and probably nowhere is studied by people more qualified to study it. Wytham Woods is a mixed woodland owned by Oxford University and widely used for field studies by biologists from the Zoology Department.

It was by comparing the great tits from here and from Oosterhout and Veluwe, in the Netherlands, that an international research team discovered that the UK great tits have been actively evolving over the last few decades and now have longer beaks than their Dutch counterparts.

The conclusion was that it was probably the British tradition of feeding birds with peanuts in feeders designed to be inaccessible to all but the smaller birds such as tits. This may have provided the selection pressure for longer beaks to become the fitter beaks in the environment of British gardens. The British spend about twice as much on bird feeders and the food to put in them as other Europeans. Early in the 20^th Century the satirical magazine Punch described bird-feeding as a British national pastime.