Date: June 28, 2018
Source: University of Washington
Summary:
For
a Galápagos penguin, beak size is nearly a perfect indicator of whether a bird
is male or female, scientists have discovered. Armed with this knowledge,
researchers could determine the sex of a bird quickly and accurately in the
wild without taking a blood sample -- speeding up field studies of this unusual
and endangered seabird.
It
turns out that to tell the sex of a Galápagos penguin, all you need is a ruler.
In
a paper published April 5 in the journal Endangered Species Research,
scientists at the University of Washington announced that, for a Galápagos
penguin, beak size is nearly a perfect indicator of whether a bird is male or
female. Armed with this knowledge, researchers could determine the sex of a
bird quickly and accurately in the wild without taking a blood sample --
speeding up field studies of this unusual and endangered seabird.
"For
Galápagos penguins, we really wanted to understand if there was a simple 'rule'
we could employ to determine sex -- a sign that would be fast and reliable,"
said lead author Caroline Cappello, a UW doctoral student in biology.
No comments:
Post a Comment