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.
