How These Birds Look So Incredibly Black

By Nathaniel Scharping | January 9, 2018 5:03 pm

Vantablack has been called the world’s darkest substance. When it was unveiled in 2014, the material made headlines for the way it seemed to leach objects of their three-dimensionality; it was so black that every feature merged into a black hole.

Darker than a black bear in a cave on a starless night, Vantablack looks downright otherworldly. But, humans are hardly alone when it comes to inky excess. Some birds, of a type normally associated with brilliant plumage, have feathers that rival the substance’s light-stealing prowess, say a group of researchers in a paper published Tuesday in Nature Communications.

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How do birds get their colors?

The role of melanins in creating complex plumage patterns in 9,000 species

Date: August 5, 2017

Source: University of Chicago Press Journals

Summary:

Birds exhibit an extraordinary diversity of plumage pigmentation patterns. It has been overlooked, however, that complex patterns can be produced only with the contribution of melanins because these are the only pigments under direct cellular control.

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Feathers fly in colourful bird study

Friday 6 Nov 2015 7:27 p.m.

Colourful plumage in male birds is not an exclusive characteristic just to attract a mate, but is linked to social and lifestyle factors, says a Massey University study published yesterday.

"A shortfall of the classical sexual selection theory is that it works so well at explaining colourful plumage in males that the rest of the variation is often forgotten about," said the study's lead author James Dale.

The study, published in science journal Nature, examined the colouration in around 6000 species of passerine birds – more commonly known as 'songbirds' – which make up around half of all bird species.

The researchers found colour is important in terms of individual competition and not just restricted to males.

Many bird species have males displaying brighter and more colourful feathers than the females, who have darker, duller plumage – a characteristic that has been attributed to the need to compete to find a partner to mate and procreate with.

Read more:

Female birds can’t shake their colorful fathers, and other lessons from studying 6,000 species

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.

Read on …

Female color perception affects evolution of male plumage in birds

Date:

November 25, 2014

Source:

University of Chicago Medical Center

Summary:

The expression of a gene involved in female birds' color vision is linked to the evolution of colorful plumage in males, reports a new study. The findings confirm the essential role of female color perception in mate selection and sexual dimorphism.

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Peacock's train is not such a drag afterall: Flight unchanged with and without plumage

Date:

September 17, 2014

Source:

University of Leeds

Summary:

The magnificent plumage of the peacock may not be quite the sacrifice to love that it appears to be, researchers have discovered. "These feathers weigh about 300g and can exceed 1.5m, so it's expected that the male birds would be making a significant sacrifice in their flight performance for being attractive," one researcher said. However, experiments showed that in fact, the plumage made no difference to take-off and flight of the birds.

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Birds' scruffy feathers are only temporary

Some of the birds in your backyard may look unkempt if not downright scraggly, as though their clothes have worn out.

Birds, of course, are clothed in feathers, and feathers do wear out. The gorgeous, eye-catching plumage you saw in spring and for most of summer has begun to fade and look tattered from being bleached by sunlight, scraped against tree limbs and scarred by dust and gravel.

Think of the wear and tear on the feathers of a bird such as a western scrub-jay, which must continuously slip in and out of a nest placed deep within a tough-barked Hill Country shrub. Or a downy woodpecker in Southeast Texas that makes untold trips to a nest inside a tree hole excavated just underneath a vertically leaning limb.

Continued:  http://www.chron.com/life/article/Birds-scruffy-feathers-are-only-temporary-3865885.php