Darwin’s Galapagos birds share rare taste for flowers: Birds made famous by British naturist expand diets to pollen and nectar

Scientists have for the first time discovered a general shift in diets across an entire group of animals while studying birds on the Galapagos islands that once helped inspire Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

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The Spanish-led team observed 19 of the 23 species of Galapagos land birds visiting flowers to eat nectar and pollen, apparently because their preferred foods of seeds or insects are in short supply on the remote Pacific islands off Ecuador.

The taste for flowers among Galapagos birds had gone unnoticed until now.

“The whole bird community expanded its niche and included floral rewards into the diet,” the scientists wrote in an edition of the journal Nature Communications published this week. 

“This phenomenon... has been previously reported for single species but never for an entire community,” they wrote.

The birds the scientists studied over four years visited more than 100 types of flower and included finches, mockingbirds and flycatchers.

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For Birds, Red Means 'Go': Some Flowers Evolved Red Hues Favored by Birds

Mar. 4, 2013 — New research has shown that certain Australian native flowers have shifted away from using insects as pollinators and evolved their flower colour to the red hues favoured by birds. 

In a study published in New Phytologist, biologists from Monash University and RMIT University have shown for the first time that Australian native flowers exclusively pollinated by birds have evolved colour spectral signatures that are best discriminated by those birds. 

Dr Adrian Dyer of Monash and RMIT said previous studies had shown that flower colour evolved to attract bees as pollinators. 

"We know that some flowers had evolved spectral signatures to suit bee pollinators, but the story for bird-pollinated flowers was not clear," Dr Dyer said. 

Lead author and PhD student Mani Shrestha of the Monash School of Biological Sciences collected spectral data from over 200 flowering plants and identified the pollinators as birds or insects. Then with Associate Professor Martin Burd -- also of the School of Biological Sciences -- did phylogenetic analyses to identify how the flowers have evolved spectral signatures. 

"We found that flowers exclusively pollinated by birds had initially evolved to suit insect vision, but more recently the spectral signature of bird-pollinated flowers had shifted towards longer wavelengths," Mr Shesthra said 

Continued: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130305100957.htm