Flycatchers and fantails: new songbirds discovered on tiny islands

Five species and five subspecies found in Indonesia in the largest discovery of its kind in more than a century

Patrick Greenfield

Thu 9 Jan 2020 19.00 GMT Last modified on Thu 9 Jan 2020 19.25 GMT

Ten new songbird species and subspecies have been identified on a trio of previously under-explored Indonesian islands in the largest discovery of its kind in more than a century, according to a new study.

Hidden away on the remote Wallacean islands of Taliabu, Peleng and Batudaka, close to where British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace independently developed the theory of evolution to Charles Darwin, five new bird species and five subspecies were detected during a six-week expedition to the area, off the coast of Sulawesi.

Although birds are among the most comprehensively documented animal classes, with only a handful of new species identified each year, the pioneering methodology used in the study, published in the journal Science, has raised the prospect of further discoveries around the world. The researchers concentrated their efforts on the islands of Taliabu and Peleng due to their likely high biodiversity because of their genetic isolation over the last few million years, revealed by using sea-depth analysis of the deep water channels in the archipelago.

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Flycatchers follow the rain

13/07/2018

Understanding what environmental cues birds use to time their annual migrations and decide where to settle is crucial for predicting how they'll be affected by a shifting climate.

A new study from The Auk: Ornithological Advances shows that for two species of tyrant flycatcher, one of the key factors is rain – the more precipitation an area receives, the more likely the birds are to be there during the non-breeding season.

Tulane University's Maggie MacPherson and her colleagues combined field techniques with species distribution models to investigate which environmental factors drove the migrations of Eastern Kingbirds and Fork-tailed Flycatchers. Using geolocators, devices that record a bird's daily location based on day length, they could track where individuals of each species went. The two species share similar behaviour and habitat requirements, but differ in their range and migration strategies, and these strategies were compared to determine the influence of temperature, precipitation and primary productivity (that is, the amount of 'green' vegetation). Precipitation turned out to be one of the most important predictors of their distribution, particularly in the non-breeding season.

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Urban Noise Makes Flycatchers Change Length of Their Songs

ScienceDaily (Nov. 20, 2012) — Do birds change their tune in response to urban noise? It depends on the bird species, according to Dr. Alejandro Ariel Ríos-Chelén from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and colleagues. Their work shows that while some birds do adapt their songs in noisy conditions by means of frequency changes, others like the vermilion flycatchers adapt their song by means of changes in song lengths.

The work is published online in Springer's journal, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

Birds use their songs during social interactions to attract females and repel intruders. Factors affecting acoustic communication, such as urban noise, may therefore impair breeding success. Research to date has shown that several songbird (or oscine) species like robins, nightingales and blackbirds, adapt their song in response to noise. This is done in order to improve acoustic communication in noisy conditions. However, little work has been done on the more tropical sister group of the oscines, the sub-oscines, which includes the vermilion flycatcher.

Rios-Chelén and team investigated whether male vermilion flycatchers adapted their song under noisy conditions in the same way as their less tropical sister group. They recorded the songs of 29 territorial vermilion flycatcher males in different parks and urban areas of Mexico City. They registered noise levels at different moments of both the pre-dawn and dawn chorus, measured song length, and counted the total number of elements in the birds' song to assess song versatility.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121120121906.htm

Flycatchers’ genomes explain how one species became two

Why are hybrids sterile?

October 2012. Just how new species are established is still one of the most central questions in biology. In an article in the leading scientific journal Nature, researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden describe how they mapped the genomes of the European pied flycatcher and the collared flycatcher and found that it is disparate chromosome structures rather than separate adaptations in individual genes that underlies the separation of the species.

"We were surprised that such a large part of the genome was nearly identical in the two species," says Hans Ellegren, professor of evolutionary biology and director of the research team behind the new findings.

Interbreeding
The big question in species-differentiation research today involves the genetic background of how two evolutionary lines gradually come to diverge from each other and ultimately cannot produce fertile young. Horses and donkeys, for instance, can crossbreed and produce mules and hinnies, but something in the genome of the latter makes them infertile. There must therefore be DNA sequences from diverging evolutionary lines that are not compatible.

Genome sequence of flycatchers

Researchers at the Evolutionary Biology Centre, Uppsala University, are now presenting the genome sequence for the two flycatchers, which are the first organisms apart from so-called model organisms, to have their genome sequenced. They are also the first DNA sequences for a vertebrate to have been determined entirely by Swedish researchers and at a Swedish laboratory. 

Continued:  http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/flycatcher-genome.html