How Galápagos finches evade a parasitic fly Date: August 10, 2021 Source: Flinders University Summary: Darwin's finches on the Galápagos Islands are once again providing insights into the theory ...

Eyewitnesses to Speciation. In 1981, Peter and Rosemary Grant, the famous husband-and-wife team of evolutionary biologists at Princeton University, had already been studying Darwin’s finches on the ...

But hybrids — with one parent of each species — fared far better in attracting mates, with song quality having no measured effect on whether these birds made a match. Only 2, or 7 percent, of ...

A hybrid bird species on the Galapagos Islands could help scientists find a way to stop an invasive fly which is killing off the hatchlings of famous Darwin's finches at an alarming rate ...

Hybrid females successfully mate with male cactus finch males, whereas the hybrid males do not successfully compete for high quality territory and mates. Because these hybrid females receive their ...

The Grants started studying Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands in 1973, ... The hybrids do just fine when food is abundant, but they are not producing a new species of their own.

For example, the famous Galápagos Islands finches named for Charles Darwin picked up survival advantages by interbreeding with other finch species (SN: 3/7/15, p. 7). But more often, hybrids don ...

Although in many species of birds the resulting chicks would be sterile, the hybrid offspring of Galápagos finches can mate with an individual from either of the two parental species. The resulting ...

The genomes of all 15 of these finch species have been sequenced, ... This is in line with field observations of hybrid birds made by study co-authors Peter and Rosemary Grant, ...

One is associated with large birds and one with small birds. We could show that the large-bird version of HMGA2 was at a selective disadvantage, and the small-bird version was at an advantage.

In some cases, those hybrids may remain rare and the two species will remain intact. In other cases, the species may collapse back on each other. The article looks at two animals in which ...