They developed a mathematical model that attributed patterns of speciation to the way that closely related species divide up their environment. According to this model, when there are few relatives around to compete for resources, such as when an environment is first colonized, species differentiate rapidly.
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This model is robust: even when the authors assumed that their phylogenetic tree contains only 25 percent of all Dendroica species, they found that their γ test was still valid, indicating that this genus experienced an explosive bout of adaptive radiation before settling down to a “more normal” rate of speciation.

This mathematical model provides an incisive tool to gain a clearer understanding of the pattern and rate of speciation for groups of closely related species, even in the absence of a fossil record, simply by analyzing their DNA.

Four decades after scientists showed that migratory birds use Earth’s magnetic field to orient themselves during their seasonal journeys, researchers have at last found a molecular mechanism that may explain how they do it.

If the hypothesis is true, the planet’s magnetic field lines — which arch around Earth from north to south — may be plainly visible to birds, like the dashed line in the middle of a road.

The work, described online yesterday in the journal Nature, was conducted in a test tube and does not prove that birds actually use the mechanism. And researchers aligned with a competing model say they are not convinced.

But by identifying for the first time a molecule that reacts to very weak magnetic fields, the experiments prove the plausibility of a long-hypothesized method of avian navigation that has had a credibility problem because no one had ever found a molecule with the required sensitivity.

Next to beneficial insects, songbirds consume the most pest insects in your yard. Robins, blackbirds, flickers and starlings will eat a lot of webworms if they are in your lawn. Many seed-eating birds prey on caterpillars while raising their young. Encourage birds to settle in or near your yard and prey on fleas by offering them food, water, and shelter.

The American Robin eats both fruit and invertebrates. Earthworms are important during the breeding season, but fruit is the main diet during winter. Robins eat different types of food depending on the time of day; they eat earthworms early in the day and more fruit later in the day.

Vocal learning is a critical behavioral substrate for spoken human language. It is a rare trait found in three distantly related groups of birds-songbirds, hummingbirds, and parrots. These avian groups have remarkably similar systems of cerebral vocal nuclei for the control of learned vocalizations that are not found in their more closely related vocal non-learning relatives. These findings led to the hypothesis that brain pathways for vocal learning in different groups evolved independently from a common ancestor but under pre-existing constraints. Here, we suggest one constraint, a pre-existing system for movement control.

Using behavioral molecular mapping, we discovered that in songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds, all cerebral vocal learning nuclei are adjacent to discrete brain areas active during limb and body movements. Similar to the relationships between vocal nuclei activation and singing, activation in the adjacent areas correlated with the amount of movement performed and was independent of auditory and visual input.
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Based upon these findings, we propose a motor theory for the origin of vocal learning, this being that the brain areas specialized for vocal learning in vocal learners evolved as a specialization of a pre-existing motor pathway that controls movement.

Seven dino-era feathers found perfectly preserved in amber in western France highlight a crucial stage in feather evolution, scientists report. The hundred-million-year-old plumage has features of both feather-like fibers found with some two-legged dinosaurs known as theropods and of modern bird feathers, the researchers said.
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The find provides a clear example “of the passage between primitive filamentous down and a modern feather,” said team member Didier Néraudeau of the University of Rennes in France. The study team isn’t sure yet whether the feathers belonged to a dino or a bird. But fossil teeth from two dino families thought to have been feathered were excavated from rocks just above the layer that contained the amber, Perrichot said. “It is entirely plausible that the feathers come from a dinosaur rather than from a bird,” he said.

The goal of this project is to create a device that will autonomously train crows. Initially we’re training them to deposit dropped coins they find on the ground in exchange for peanuts, but eventually we hope to be able to train them to search and rescue, or to collect garbage, or who knows!
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This is the highest-risk segment of the machine’s operation. At this point coins alone are made available whenever the bird lands on the perch. However, should a bird peck or sweep coins off the tray and cause a coin to fall down the funnel, the device then produces some peanuts. This stage is designed to cement in the crows’ mind the relationship between coins going down the funnel and peanuts being made available.
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Finally we shift the device into its intended, and long-term state of only providing peanuts when coins go down the funnel. Nothing is otherwise provided aside from coins scattered around the device at the beginning of the project.

In 1982 the large ground finch arrived on the tiny Galápagos island of Daphne, just east of the island of San Salvador (map of the Galápagos).

Since then the medium ground finch, a long-time Daphne resident, has evolved to have a smaller beak—apparently as a result of direct competition with the larger bird for food.

Evolutionary theory had previously suggested that competition between two similar species can drive the animals to evolve in different directions.

But until now the effect had never been observed in action in the wild.
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Jonathan Losos is an evolutionary ecologist at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, who was not involved with the Grants’ work.

“This study will be an instant textbook classic,” he said.

World Health Organization officials are meeting in Geneva to consider the possibility of a global human bird flu pandemic as the deadly H5N1 strain continues to spread rapidly in birds.

Top influenza official Margaret Chan said the outbreak in poultry is historically unprecedented. She said the deadly virus presents a greater challenge to the world than any other emerging infectious disease.

The meeting was called to plan a response in case the bird flu virus mutates into a widespread human flu virus.