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posted by martyb on Sunday October 22 2017, @04:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the maybe-that-explains-Pinocchio dept.

Great tits in the UK may be evolving longer beaks to better access bird feeders, compared to their counterparts in the Netherlands:

Setting up a bird feeder is one of the easiest ways to interact with wildlife. But could this seemingly innocent pastime be changing the very shape of our backyard birds? It's still too early to say for sure, says Lewis Spurgin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. But he and his colleagues have discovered some truly fascinating clues that a bird called the great tit may be evolving longer beaks to access bird feeders.

"We know that evolution by natural selection produces peacocks' tails and giraffes' necks and that sort of thing," says Spurgin, whose findings were published today in Science. "But it also works in much more subtle ways that are much more difficult to observe."

Also at Newsweek and Science Daily (reprint).

Recent natural selection causes adaptive evolution of an avian polygenic trait (DOI: 10.1126/science.aal3298) (DX)


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 22 2017, @06:14AM (5 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday October 22 2017, @06:14AM (#585885) Journal

    Wait - is this a Buzzard submission? Part of that massive submission of massive boobies, or whatever the hell Ari was bitching about? The lack of attribution for the submission confuses me . . .

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Sunday October 22 2017, @06:17AM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday October 22 2017, @06:17AM (#585887) Journal

    Look again (don't get distracted by the tits).

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    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 5, Informative) by lx on Sunday October 22 2017, @07:35AM (2 children)

    by lx (1915) on Sunday October 22 2017, @07:35AM (#585894)

    Tits are not boobies!
    Don't get the two confused.

    A booby [wikipedia.org] is a sea bird.
    A tit [wikipedia.org] is found inland.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @10:03AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @10:03AM (#585916)

      Do you mean a European Great Tit, or an African Great Tit?

      • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday October 23 2017, @06:20PM

        by RS3 (6367) on Monday October 23 2017, @06:20PM (#586469)

        Ah, I, I don't know that! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!