Year: 2022

REGIONAL PHENOTYPIC VARIATION. “Biologists have long known U.K. great tits had longer beaks than those in continental Europe, but the reason for this difference was unclear. Now a group of Dutch and British researchers tracked the variation down to the birds’ genes and found natural selection at work.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

REGIONAL GENETIC VARIATION. “They first embarked on an ambitious investigation into the genomes—the complete sets of genes—of 2,322 great tits from across the U.K. and the Netherlands. They flagged spots in the genomes between the two populations that were most different, which turned out to be the same spots that were the least different among the genomes of individual U.K. birds.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

SHIFTING GENE PROFILES. “Favored genes had nudged their way into these areas and, with time, pushed out most other genes that might have been found there—a clear indication natural selection was at work, according to the researchers.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

HOMOLOGOUS GENES. “They then labeled around 30 of the genes that seemed to oust all the others and scanned the scientific literature to figure out what role these genes played in other organisms. It turns out many of them are involved in human skull development and bill length in Darwin’s finches—Galápagos Islands birds that served as the famed biologist’s most famous subjects.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

BEAK LENGTH GENES. “The scientists suspected these genes could be linked to beak length, so they measured this anatomical feature in U.K. great tits. They found birds with that handful of favored genes, as expected, tended to have longer beaks than their continental counterparts in the Netherlands.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

EVOLUTION IN THIRTY YEARS. “Even just in the last 30 years we’ve seen the beak lengths getting longer in the U.K. population.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

STUFFED BEAK LENGTHS. “The researchers then scoured museum collections and looked at specimens of the birds collected since the 1920s to confirm their findings. Something about the U.K. environment was giving longer beaks an edge.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

PRECEDENT SITUATIONS. “There are documented instances—such as studies on Darwin’s finches—that show evolution of beak length results from differences in food availability.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

BRITISH ECCENTRICS. “Around half of U.K. homes feed birds in their gardens. And the U.K. spends twice as much on birdseed than the whole of continental Europe.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

BROOD SURVIVAL ADVANTAGE. “In the U.K. the great tits with the genes for shorter beaks had fewer surviving chicks per year than those with longer ones...although the difference is small this probably means the latter were better able to bring seeds back to their young.” Millimeters count. https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn