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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)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @07:48AM (2 children)
Birdfeeders? I thought they were evolving to help attract potential mates.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @08:49AM
If you don't eat, then you don't breed. Right?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 23 2017, @04:53AM
A problem some folks have with their avian lunch counters is competition from squirrels.
The little bastards climb up the poles or shimmy down cords or drop from branches or jump from a perch.
Back when I read sci.electronics.design regularly, from time to time someone would ask for an electrical solution.
The answer is ages old and doesn't require a power supply:
Fill your feeder with jalapeño seeds.
Just mixing them in in sufficient quantities with the other stuff can do the trick.
Mammals have receptors for capsaicin and birds don't.
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