Date: March 27, 2019
Source: Louisiana State University
In the
lush, lowland rainforests on the island of Borneo lives a rather common, drab
brown bird called the Cream-vented Bulbul, or Pycnonotus simplex. This bird is found from southern Thailand to
Sumatra, Java and Borneo. In most of its range, it has white eyes. On Borneo,
however, most individuals have red eyes, although there are also a few with
white eyes. For 100 years, naturalists have thought the eye-color difference on
Borneo was a trivial matter of individual variation. Through persistent
detective work and advances in genetic sequencing technology, Louisiana State
University Museum of Natural Science researchers have discovered that the
white-eyed individuals of Borneo in fact represent a completely new species.
Their discovery of the Cream-eyed Bulbul, or Pycnonotus pseudosimplex, was published recently in the scientific
journal, the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club.
"One
of the reasons we knew we had a new species as opposed to just a variant of
another species was because the two populations -- the red-eyed and white-eyed
populations -- actually occur together on Borneo. You can go to a site and see
both of these birds. One of the theories of speciation is if two birds co-occur
in the same area, and they are not interbreeding, then that's a definitive sign
that they are different species," said Subir Shakya, lead author and LSU
Department of Biological Sciences Ph.D. student.
No comments:
Post a Comment