Beak of the Finch – Flashcards
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All of Darwin's finches are thought to have evolved from a single ancestor species that first colonized the Galapagos. How many species of Darwin's finches are there?
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13
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A typical finch species eats seeds. What are three of the most unusual, unfinch-like diets found among Darwin's finches?
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1. Eats green leaves 2. Drinks blood and egg yolk 3. Eat cambium and phloem under bark 4. Ticks 5. Grubs
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What does Wiener mean when he says that "Darwin in the Galapagos was still half in Milton's universe?
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He collected specimens two by two because of the creationist ideals he accepted as did most naturalists, just as Noah did.
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What is the "fable that has grown up around Darwin and his finches" to which the author refers?
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That the finches and it's beaks and pigeons were the defining moments of his theory of evolution
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How did Lydell's Principles of Geology influence Darwin's thinking on evolution?
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As he travelled he found strong evidence to support Lydell's claim that the earth was changing (ie constantly created and destroyed) which opened the possibility for species to to the same
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What is the selective force in "artificial selection?"
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Breeders and the characteristics they want to keep or change
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Taxonomists—scientists who classify organisms—are often dichotomized as "lumpers" and "splitters". What is the basic distinction between the two?
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Splitters define more species and subspecies while lumpers do the opposite
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What is the most important taxonomic feature used to distinguish among species of Darwin's finches?
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Their beaks
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Species that live on islands or in other isolated places (e.g., in lakes) often lack the appropriate behavioral (or immune) responses to deal with predators (or pathogens/parasites) that were not part of their recent evolutionary history. This phenomenon is referred to as ecological naïveté. What about the behavior of Galapagos' birds indicates their ecological naïveté?
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They are not afraid of humans
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What is the main thing that the size and shape of a bird's bill can tell you about its lifestyle?
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It tells what the bird can eat
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Character displacement is an ecological pattern in which two closely related species are much more similar when they occur apart (e.g., on different islands) than when they occur together (e.g., on the same island). Such species are thought to diverge in form when they are together due to the process of competition. What is a specific example of character displacement among Darwin's finches?
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Lack discovered that many finches with similar or dissimilar beaks eating the same thing were doing so on different islands ....berries on the lava fields
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How did visiting the islands during the dry season change Peter and Rosemary Grant's perspective on their research subjects?
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By watching the ground finches eat in the summer when seeds were rare, they noticed that finches with large beaks ate large seeds , medium ate medium seeds, and small ate small seeds
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Peter Boag's proposed egg-switching experiment (His experiment would have used foster parents, birds who had the eggs of other birds put into their nests to incubate and raise.) to raise some birds and the biological parents to raise others. He wanted to test a hypothesis about the relative importance of nature (= genetics; the term heritability is used to denote the degree to which traits are passed on genetically from parent to offspring) versus nurture (= the developmental environment of the birds, including the amount and kinds of food fed to them by their parents). Assuming a high heritability of beak size in finches, which group of parents, foster or biological, would you predict finches to most closely resemble if Boag were to complete his experiment?
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Their biological parents
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Why did a higher percentage of males than females survive the drought?
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Because they were bigger, the biggest males and females survived
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How did the resultant skewed sex ratio affect the breeding success of males, and which of the surviving males were most successful?
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Only 1 of 6 males mated among fortis .... A very small subsample of males .... The males that were successful we're the largest with blackest and most mature plumage, and the deepest beaks
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Part of this chapter describes sexual selection. In natural selection, the selective agent is part of the physical environment (e.g., drought, high or low temperatures, etc.) or is another organism (e.g., a parasite, predator, or competitor). What are the selective agents in sexual selection?
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Biggest Body and beak size, and largest territories and jet black plumage (this signifies age and experience)
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What would a graph of the size of guppies spots (on the y-axis from small to large size) versus the number of guppy predators in the environment (on the x-axis from few to many) look like?
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The small faint spots correlate with the most predators and the big bright spots correlate with the least predators
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How do natural selection and sexual selection interact to shape the color and patterning of guppies in South American streams?
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Natural selection and sexual selection determine the size and colorations extend.....they work together to make infinite variability
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Suppose you discovered a population of guppies in a Trinidadian stream that had never been surveyed before. What prediction does John Endler's research make about the coloration pattern of these guppies if the stream is devoid of natural predators?
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The guppies will have big bright spots
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How did the El Niño year lead to selection against large body size in both males and females?
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There were not as many large seeds and the larger birds had larger appetites the couldn't satisfy as the supply of smaller seeds diminished
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J.B.S. Haldane, who defined the unit of evolution known as a darwin, has his name attached to something known as Haldane' Paradox. This paradox observes that the long-term rate of evolution inferred from the fossil record may be very slow, yet the short-term rate of evolution measured over a few years can be very fast. How does the Grant's research on Darwin's finches help resolve this paradox?
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The closer you look in real time you see quick changes but because of changes going one way and then reversed, the farther removed one is the longer changes take
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What is a hybrid? What was unusual about the hybrids that the Grant's discovered?
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The product of two different mating species These hybrids they discovered were highly successful in mating and offspring are doing well They are becoming the fittest.
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What is the step in Darwin's "one long argument" that skeptics may "find hard to follow?"
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That the process of natural selection can create something new
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What estimate does Wiener give for the number of species now alive?
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Between 2 million and 30 million
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What is rafting and how does it relate to Darwin's experiment with seeds in saltwater?
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Where vegetation floats down the river and into the ocean . The Grants put seeds from a tree found in the Galapagos that came from Santiago originally and proved that they can float....the rafting proved that loose debris can make it to the Galapagos
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The ecologist G.E. Hutchinson used a metaphor to describe the relationship between ecology and evolution. He portrayed ecological interactions (mutualisms, predation, competition, etc.) as providing the "theater" in which the "evolutionary play" unfolded. Both competitive exclusion and character displacement are named for observed evolutionary patterns. What ecological process is assumed to be important in producing each of these patterns?
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Divergence
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What other group of organism did Dolph Schluter find to be competing with nectar-feeding bumblebees?
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small finches
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To what does Wiener's metaphor of "invisible shores" refer?
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The isolation of species that the species create
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The set of experiments described on pp. 165 -168 indicated that what features are important in mate choice among these species of Darwin's finches? Are these examples of intersexual or intrasexual selection?
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1 song 2. Beaks It is an example of inter sexual selection. Intrasexual selection happens when males compete against each other (male to male combat)...weapons vs ornaments
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What "force" seems to be partly responsible for producing the large number of Drosophila fly species on the Hawaiian islands?
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Sexual selection
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What does Wiener refer to in his metaphors of "fission" and "fusion?"
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Cactus finches ... The metaphors was an amoeba cinching at the waist
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What did the experiments of Benkman and Lindholm demonstrate was the advantage of the twisted beak of the crossbill?
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It allows them to open hard to open pine cones to get the seeds
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What does Weiner think will happen when Dolph Schluter introduces limnetic (open-water dwelling) and benthic (bottom dwelling) fishes into separate ponds?
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That they will converge into the middle They will evolve towards each other and they will be able to dine in open water and the bottom
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What is a hybrid? What percentage of the world's bird species are thought to have hybridized with other species?
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Two species mating together 1 out of 10 or 10% earlier estimates were 2 and 3 %
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What evolutionary process do Darwin's finches, Hawaiian finches (known as honeycreepers) and cichlid fishes of East Africa have in common?
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Adaptive radiation
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What do we call the "writing on the wall" that Darwin predicted must exist but which he never "saw?"
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Genes
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Name the two most likely geographic locations for the ancestor of Darwin's finches that first colonized the Galapagos and radiated into the extant finch species.
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(1)West indies (2) Central and South America
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What is stabilizing selection, the process first described by Hermon Bumpus in 1898?
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The birds that diverged the most from the original type died more
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What are the "islands" that haw (i.e., hawthorne) and apple flies "are marooned on in time"?
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Apples
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Invasive (also nonnative or exotic) species are one of the major, current threats to biological diversity. Darwin foresaw their potential to cause problems for native species. How is the concept of ecological naiveté relevant in the context of invasive species?
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Invasive species have the upper hand at first but overtime as other species adapt to the intruder, the intruder must evolve as well
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There are three general forms of natural selection. Directional selection is selection for one extreme of a distribution or another. Disruptive selection is selection against the mean and for both extremes of a distribution. What does stabilizing selection accomplish and what are examples of this given by Wiener?
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Stabilizing selection preserves the mean Examples are: Barnacles and Fruit flies
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Exotic species are a problem on the Galapagos Islands (as they now are on many other islands, like the Hawaiian Islands). What are some of the problem species that have been introduced directly or indirectly by human commerce?
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Cats rats mice dogs goats donkeys fire ants pineapples bananas and guavas
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What's the most specific level of classification indicated by the name of Floreana's Geospiza magnirostris magnirostris?
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Subspecies
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What is the most likely cause of its disappearance?
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The introduction of invading species like rats and cats would have easily killed them and the cactus megasperma megasperma they fed on became extinct by cattle and donkeys which the prisoners brought
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What are the three areas discussed by Wiener where "resistance movements" have developed?
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(1) Poaching for certain characteristics (2) Antibiotics (3) Pesticides
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What selective pressure may be leading to tusklessness in East African elephants?
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Poachers killed elephants with the largest tusks or even smaller tusks but not as much
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What physical feature most closely determines seasonality in the Galapagos?
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The alternating cold and warm ocean currents from north and south determines seasons.
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When this book was published in 1994, the evidence for climate change was already mounting. What does Wiener's chapter title of "A partner in the process" mean in the context of climate change?
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(1)The evolution process is continuing due to extreme seasonal changes due to global warming... The finches could fuse together through evolution and possibly create a new species (2) We are masters and slaves We are all involved in the process of evolution
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Why have the dark carbonaria mutants of Biston betularia declined rapidly all over Britain?
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The legislation enacted to clean the air from the industrial revolution to the post industrial revolution is the main reason for their decline
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This book has been about biological evolution, genetic changes that happen within a population over time. What is cultural evolution and how does it differ from biological evolution?
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The ability to learn new tricks from each other biological evolution is physical change, cultural evolution is mental change through learning from generations before us
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According to Wiener, what is the "beak" of humans?
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The human mind
