Avian painting

Avian painting
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Every once in awhile, I will read a scientific paper that astonishes and delights me so
much that I can hardly wait to tell you all about it. Such is the situation with a newly published paper about the Hawai'ian Honeyeaters. Avian painting In short, due to the remarkable power of convergent evolution, Hawai'ian Honeyeaters have thoroughly deceived taxonomists and ornithologists as to their true origin and identity for more than 200 years.

Like an artist molding a lump of clay into a specific shape to meet her demands, so nature operates through natural selection to take advantage of naturally-occurring genetic variation throughout the generations to alter the physiology, morphology and behavior of living beings to meet ecological demands, Avian painting. Bold mutations can result in dramatic changes, while subtle genetic variations result in smaller, sometimes hidden, shifts -- but only if these changes are adaptive, only if they provide the owner of those genes with a special "edge" that allows them to attract more and fitter mates, Still life oil painting and to produce more and fitter offspring who then pass on these adaptive genes to future generations.

"It's like we had this animal we always thought was a dog, and it's turned out to be a mongoose," reports one of my scientific colleagues, Robert Fleischer, of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Fleischer was the lead author of this study.

The Hawai'ian Avian painting striking resemblance to the Honeyeaters of New Guinea and Australia demonstrates how evolution within different lineages can cause dissimilar species to converge on similar body plans and forms to meet the demands of similar "jobs".

The Honeyeaters are -- were -- all classified into the same taxonomic family, Still life oil painting and Meliphagidae, based on several shared characters. First, they specialize in consuming a sugary diet of nectar so they have long tubular or semi-tubular tongues with a brush on the tip, which evolved for gathering nectar from flowers (figure 1); their beaks curve downwards (figure 2); they have an operculum over their nares to protect their nasal cavity from pollen; and all these species function in ecologically important roles as pollinators and as dispersers of seeds. Avian painting and other characters that these birds share are long legs and strong, perching feet; and remarkable similarities in plumage color and pattern (figure 2), behavior -- and even in song.