The great bustard is a vulnerable species of bird with a wide range from Iberia and northwest Morocco in the west to China in the east. There are two subspecies: Otis tarda tarda, which extends from Iberia and north Morocco through central and southeast Europe to Turkey, Iran and east to Kazakhstan and central Siberia; […]
Tag: sexual dimorphism
Some hummingbird females display male coloring to avoid being harassed
Female hummingbirds sometimes look like the brightly colored males of their species. Researchers have long pondered the reason for this. Now, a study of hummingbirds in Panama suggests that sporting male-like feathers helps some females avoid intense bullying, researchers recently reported in Current Biology. To find out why this surprising pattern arises, researchers studied the […]
Ornithologists Map Family Tree of Mysterious Cotinga Birds
Yale University ornithologists Prof Richard Prum and Jacob Berv have mapped out the first large-scale evolutionary family tree for the Neotropical cotingas – some of the brightest, loudest, oddest-looking birds in the world. There are more than 60 species of the cotingas, a highly diverse group of birds that make up the family Cotingidae. They […]
Scientists discover single gene that enables multiple morphs in a butterfly
Scientists have discovered the gene enabling multiple female morphs that give the Common Mormon butterfly its very tongue-in-cheek name. doublesex, the gene that controls gender in insects, is also a mimicry supergene that determines diverse wing patterns in this butterfly, according to a recent study published in Nature. The study also shows that the supergene […]