As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Friday 23 November 2018

Geneticist solves long-standing finch beak mystery



Bridgett vonHoldt found a single genetic key that unlocked beak size in a central African finch species
Date:  November 19, 2018
Source:  Princeton University
Bridgett vonHoldt is best known for her work with dogs and wolves, so she was surprised when a bird biologist pulled her aside and said, "I really think you can help me solve this problem." So she turned to a mystery he'd been wrestling with for more than 20 years.
"I love a good challenge and especially working on new questions!" said vonHoldt, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton. "I was presented with a new problem in an entirely new system, which was an incredible opportunity to explore how different ecologies could promote different evolutionary patterns."
The birder and biologist was Tom Smith, who has spent his career studying finches -- specifically, black-bellied seedcrackers (Pyrenestes ostrinus) -- in Cameroon and in his lab at the University of California-Los Angeles.
He and his colleagues have spent years investigating why some of these finches have small beaks while others have large beaks. Much of their original work identified differences in the hardness of the seeds they eat, a story quite similar to that of Darwin's finches. Smith, who is a professor at UCLA as well as the founding director of the Center for Tropical Research, established a breeding colony of these finches to understand the inheritance of beak size.

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