Category: Article

Tags

Published: April 21, 2013

One of the most interesting things learned about birds in 2012

John Bates, Curator and Section Head, Life Sciences, Negaunee Integrative Research Center

For our 2013 Members’ Nights at the museum, I decided to include specimens of two birds, Cinereous Mourner (Laniocera hypopyrra) and Brazilian Laniisoma (Laniisoma elegans) in what I brought out to show people.  Humans have too little time or appreciation for natural history these days, but sometimes, someone discovers something that is so cool that people need to hear about it.  These birds illustrate an example of that.

For our 2013 Members’ Nights at the Museum, I decided to include specimens of two birds, Cinereous Mourner (Laniocera hypopyrra) and Brazilian Laniisoma (Laniisoma elegans) in what I brought out to show people.  Humans have too little time or appreciation for natural history these days, but sometimes, someone discovers something that is so cool that people need to hear about it.  These birds illustrate an example of that.  In the September 2012 issue of the Wilson Bulletin, Fernando Da’ Horta and co-authors Guy Kirwan (a Field Museum Bird Division Research Associate) and Dante Buzazetti published a paper entitled "Gaudy Juvenile Plumages of Cinereous Mourner (Laniocera hypopyrra) and Brazilian Laniisoma (Laniisoma elegans)."  I wonder how many ornithologists flipped through this issue without realizing how amazing what was described in this article was.  Cinereous Mourner is a fairly common mid-story bird found throughout the Amazon Basin. The thumbnail for this post is a handheld individual netted during our field work along the Rio Japurá in western Amazonian Brazil.  We have 26 Cinereous Mourner specimens in our collection (and 5 Brownish Mourners, L. rufescens its geographic sister species from Central America). It is fair to say that such dull-colored birds are often overlooked for their more colorful cousins.  In this case, there were clues, but no one realized what they meant.  The species gains a small amount of notoriety because it occasionally has a few orange feathers in the body plumage that are broadly tipped with black (see the photo of a specimen that Doug Stotz collected in southern Amazonia and a photo of a Brownish Mourner specimen I took at the Western Foundation last Fall).  This species was described by Vieillot in 1817, so we’ve known about it for about for 186 years, but until Fernando saw an adult feeding a juvenile no one realized the significance of those occasional orange feathers.  The painting is of the scene that confronted him in the forest one morning.  The juvenile Cinereous Mourner is covered in these orange feathers.  Thus, the juvenile is as brightly colored as the adult is gray. 

            This is simply amazing.  Juveniles and chicks of most species are camouflaged, presumably to avoid detection by predators, and here is a species in which the young is orange with black spots, and because of the feather structure, it looks almost hairy. The authors speculate that it could be aposematic coloration, meaning that the juvenile Cinereous Mourners have some sort of noxious chemical in their plumage or tissue that makes them unpalatable.  Another interesting possibility could be that they have evolved to mimic a poisonous caterpillar. This kind of mimicry is termed Batesian Mimicry (I am unrelated to this Bates as far as I know).  It is pretty neat to think that a bird might have evolved to mimic an insect.  Here is a link to a photo I found of the kind of an Amazonian caterpillar that might be involved in such mimicry.

            I’ll make the claim that had this discovery been associated with a dinosaur, it would have made the cover of the journals Nature or Science.  I guess this is just professional jealousy from an ornithologist, but I really do think this is just such an incredible discovery that I am excited to bring it up here.  It took scientists working in the Amazon Basin over 180 years for this basic aspect of a common and widespread species’ biology to be uncovered and still it has only been seen once. 

            The interesting aspects of this story do not even end there.  The authors recognized that there was another interesting example of juveniles with bright colors.  This was from two specimens of Brazilian Laniisoma that had been collected in 1893 and were housed in the British Museum (see image below).  Brazilian Laniisoma (Laniosoma elegans) is an enigmatic green and yellow bird from the Atlantic Forest and the Andes.  And wouldn’t you know it, the higher level systematics projects on suboscine birds had uncovered a deep, but well supported sister relationship that had never before been suggested between Lanisoma and Laniocera.

            The story went over well at Members’ Nights, as people appreciated the fact that even with birds we have known about for hundreds of years, there are still important and fascinating aspects of natural history that we have yet to learn about.

Check out the original paper:

Fernando Mendonça D'Horta, Guy M. Kirwan, and Dante Buzzetti (2012) Gaudy Juvenile Plumages of Cinereous Mourner (Laniocera hypopyrra) and Brazilian Laniisoma (Laniisoma elegans). The Wilson Journal of Ornithology: September 2012, Vol. 124, No. 3, pp. 429-435.

John Bates
Curator and Section Head, Life Sciences

Contact Information

The tropics harbor the highest species diversity on the planet.  I am most intrigued by evolution at the tips of the tree of life.  My students and I study genetic structure in tropical birds and other organisms to address how this diversity evolved and how it continues to evolve as climates change and humans continue to alter landscapes.

We study comparative genetic structure and evolution primarily in the Afrotropics, the Neotropics, and the Asian tropics.  I am an ornithologist, but students working with me and my wife Shannon Hackett and other museum curators also have studied amphibians and small mammals (bats and rodents) and more recently internal, external and blood parasites (e.g., Lutz et al. 2015, Block et al. 2015, Patitucci et al. 2016).  Research in the our lab has involved gathering and interpreting genetic data in both phylogeographic and phylogenetic frameworks. Phylogenetic work on Neotropical birds has focused on rates of diversification and comparative biogeography (Tello and Bates 2007, Pantané et al 2009, Patel et al. 2011, Lutz et al. 2013, Dantas et al. 2015).  Phylogeographic work has sought to understand comparative patterns of divergence at level of population and species across different biomes (Bates et al 2003, Bates et al. 2004, Bowie et al. 2006, I. Caballero dissertation research, Block et al. 2015, Winger and Bates 2015, Lawson et al. 2015).  We also have used genetic data to better understand evolutionary patterns in relation to climate change across landscapes (e.g., Carnaval and Bates 2007) that include the Albertine Rift (through our MacArthur Grants, e.g., Voelker et al. 2010, Engel et al. 2014), the Eastern Arc Mountains (Lawson dissertation research, Lawson et al. 2015), the Philippines (T. Roberts and S. Weyandt dissertation research) and South America, particularly the Amazon (Savit dissertation research, Savit and Bates 2015, Figueiredo et al. 2013), and we are entering into the genomic realm focusing initially on Andean (Winger et al. 2015) and Amazonian birds (through our NSF Dimensions of Diversity grant). Shane DuBay is doing his dissertation research in the Himalayas on physiological plasticity in Tarsiger Bush Robins.  Nick Crouch, who I co-advise at U. Illinois, Chicago with Roberta Mason-Gamer, is studying specialization in birds from a modern phylogenetic perspective.  We seek to create a broader understanding of diversification in the tropics from a comparative biogeographic framework (Silva and Bates 2002, Kahindo et al, 2007, Bates et al. 2008, Antonelli et al. 2009).  João Capurucho (U. Illinois, Chicago, co-advised with Mary Ashley)  is studying phlylogeography of Amazonian white sand specialist birds and Natalia Piland (Committee on Evolutionary Biology, U. Chicago) is studying the impact of urbanization on Neotropical birds.  New graduate student Valentina Gomez Bahamon (U. Illinois, Chicago) is also working Boris Igic and me, after doing her Master Degree in her native Colombia on genomics and the evolution of migrating Fork-tailed Flycatchers (Tyrannus savana).  Jacob Cooper (Committee on Evolutionary Biology, U. Chicago) is studying the diversification of birds in Afromonte forests

Josh Engel and I are working up multi-species phylogeographic studies of birds across the Albertine Rift, based the Bird Division's long term research throughout the region.  We are working up similar data sets for Malawian birds.  Our current NSF Dimensions of Diversity grant on the assembly of the Amazonian biota and our NSF grant to survey birds and their parasites across the southern Amazon are generating genomic data for analysis in collaboration with paleoecologists, climatologists, geologists, and remote sensing experts from the U.S. and Brazil.  These large collaborative projects are providing new perspectives on the history of Amazonia.

Related content,Check this out