Date:April 13, 2016
Source:Universiteit van Amsterdam (UVA)
How diet has affected the evolution of the 10,000 bird species in the world is still a mystery to evolutionary biology. A study by Daniel Kissling of the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (UvA) and colleagues from the University of São Paulo and the University of Utah shows how diet preferences have influenced bird diversification over millions of years. The findings were published in Nature Communications.
Since the seminal work by Charles Darwin, it is know that dietary habits of birds can affect the evolution of species, such as the beak sizes of Galapagos finches. However, birds show an astonishing diversity of species and dietary adaptations, ranging from very small nectar-feeding hummingbirds to large carnivorous eagles. How such diverse dietary preferences ultimately lead to differences in diversification dynamics (i.e. the balance between speciation and extinction) of different birds has not yet been examined.
Diet dataset
The researchers compiled an impressive diet dataset of almost all bird species in the world together with a large phylogenetic tree that represent the relatedness of all bird species. Using models of trait-dependent diversification, they then showed that omnivorous bird lineages (with species that feed on many different food items) have lower rates of speciation (i.e. generating less new species) and higher rates of extinction (i.e. losing more existing species) than species which prefer specific food items such as fruits, nectar, or insects. Furthermore, the researchers also found that over deep evolutionary time birds which are specialized on a particular food item often add other food items to their diets, resulting in evolving transitions into omnivory.
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