Date:
November 4, 2015
Source:
McMaster University
The
evolution of male songbirds as the colorful consorts of drab female partners is
more complicated than long thought, says a McMaster researcher on a team that
looked at nearly 6,000 species for a massive study published in the journal Nature.
Conventional
wisdom has held that in many species, male birds were more colorful because
they were competing for female attention, and that female birds were less
colorful because they needed camouflage while guarding their nests.
Now
advances in computing power and new methods that compare coloration in
different species have allowed the researchers on the study to look at every
species of passerine, the perching songbirds that make up about 60 per cent of
the world's 10,000 species of birds.
The
study offers impressive new evidence that supports some old theories while
setting others to rest, explains Cody Dey, an author of
the Nature paper who was completing his PhD in Biology at McMaster at
the time of the research.
The
question of plumage colour is significant, Dey, explains, because birds,
especially males, give up so much to look so good, creating an evolutionary
mystery that asks exactly what they gain in return for rendering themselves
more vulnerable to predation. "These are the questions that have been
asked since the start of ecology," he says.
Among
the ideas the research supports is that females would have evolved to be even
more different than males than they already are, except that every female
inherits the genetic material of a colorful male -- an ancestry that is
impossible to shake. "If colorful males do better, they're going to
produce colorful daughters as well, even though it's not necessarily
advantageous for the daughters," Dey says.
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