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posted by takyon on Monday August 22 2016, @11:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the conserving-the-color-pool dept.

For decades, conservationists have considered blue-winged warblers to be a threat to golden-winged warblers, a species being considered for federal Endangered Species protection. Blue-winged warbler populations have declined 66 percent since 1968, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey. The two species are known to frequently interbreed where they co-occur, and scientists have been concerned that the more numerous blue-winged warblers would genetically swamp the rarer golden-wing gene pool.

New research from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Fuller Evolutionary Biology Program shows that, genetically speaking, blue-winged and golden-winged warblers are almost identical. Scientists behind the research say the main differences between the two species are in feather color and pattern, in some cases just a simple matter of dominant or recessive pairings of gene variants, or alleles.

[...] The team investigated the genetic architecture behind the differences between the two warblers by analyzing the genomes of 10 golden-winged and 10 blue-winged warblers from New York, with birds sampled from the Sterling Forest along the New Jersey border to the St. Lawrence River Valley. Across their analysis of the entire genomes of both species, they found only six regions (or less than .03 percent) that showed strong differences. In other words, blue-winged and golden-winged warblers are 99.97 percent alike genetically. One of the differentiating regions has a gene that likely controls yellow/white versus black throat coloration; the black throat of the golden-winged warbler is a Mendellian recessive trait, occurring only in birds that have a pair of recessive alleles of this genetic variant. Another region likely controls body color; the yellow body of blue-winged warblers is likely an incompletely recessive trait.

When blue-winged and golden-winged warblers interbreed, they produce various hybrids, including two forms called the Brewster's Warbler (with a light body and no black throat) and Lawrence's Warbler (with a yellow body and black throat). The new research shows the Brewster's form of golden- and blue-winged warbler hybrids seems to be an expression of dominant traits for throat and body color, whereas the Lawrence's form of hybrid exhibits recessive trait expression for both.

Plumage Genes and Little Else Distinguish the Genomes of Hybridizing Warblers (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2016.06.034) (DX)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @02:49AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @02:49AM (#391980)

    "conservationists have considered blue-winged warblers to be a threat to golden-winged warblers, a species being considered for federal Endangered Species protection. Blue-winged warbler populations have declined 66 percent since 1968,"

    It should have read "Golden-Winged Warbler populations have declined 66 percent since 1968," as it is clearly written on the American Bird Conservancy page.
    https://abcbirds.org/bird/golden-winged-warbler/ [abcbirds.org]