Excited to share an invited commentary about the fantastic and ambitious work by @nicmalexandre.bsky.social and colleagues in @globalchangebio.bsky.social on Anna's Hummingbird beaks. It was a joy to write about, congratulations on a super cool study!
TL;DR: Feeders are associated with population growth, and morphological change in hummingbird beaks Read it here 👉 dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb.... #ornithology#evolution#climatechange
Finally I wanted to thank the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (Shoutout to curator Carla Cicero), the U.S. Census, Christmas Bird Count, PRISM Climate Group, and Newspapers.com for the resources that have been made available.
I also want to thank our fearless mentor, Prof. Alejo Rico-Guevara who has kept the passion alive throughout. And thank you to the best co-leads authors ever, PhD students Simon English and Faye Romero who made this process fun!
We are so grateful to Prof. Laura Stein for her advice on modeling, and to CJ Battey @cjbattey.bsky.social for his help with data acquisition and analysis. We are indebted to Grieg et al. & Battey et al. for their foundational work that inspired this project.
Huge thanks to undergrads who made this work possible: Timothy Barnes, Audrey E. Smith, Saron Akalu, Haarini Sridhar, Gillian Montross & Ezra Collins.👏👏
To test this, Prof. Don Powers @lampornis.bsky.social showed hummingbirds actively heat their beaks after flight. Turns out, the bill helps dissipate heat during perching! 🔥➡️💨
But climate matters too. Using PRISM data, we found that in cooler areas in the north, beaks are shorter, smaller, and deeper, consistent with thermoregulation theory. ❄️☀️
Collaborating with Prof. Zoe Migicovsky @zoemig.bsky.social , Alejandro Rico-Guevara, Felipe Garzón-Agudelo & Kevin Epperly, we used 2D & 3D shape data to show: Beaks are getting more slender, tapered, and in males, pointier! 🐦
Co-first author Faye Romero and I modelled bill changes of Anna’s hummingbirds in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology’s collection (dating to 1860). 📏 We found bill length and maxillary surface area increased with feeder density.
Building on that, co-first author Simon English showed that feeder abundance was the best predictor of Anna’s hummingbird population growth, especially in the north, where Grieg et al. showed that birds rely more on feeders.
It started with newspaper archives 📜: Prof. Eliza Grames tracked hummingbird feeder mentions by county in California from 1860 on. She found feeder use rose rapidly, especially from southern to northern CA.
🚨New paper alert!🚨 We show that hummingbird beaks have changed in shape & size since around WWII, driven by the rise of commercialized feeders! 🧵 📄 Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb.... #ornithology#evolution#GlobalChangeBiology
The starry sturgeon (A. stellatus) carries extra Hox genes, genes that control body plans, but not all are active! After genome duplications, some genes turned off, while others evolved new functions. #2025MMM#RIP
Gemmel et al sequence the Tuatara genome in 2020 and found the lineage diverged from snakes and lizards 250 Mya. The tuatara genome is 2.4× larger than the anole genome but 64% of it is repetitive sequences and has the highest percentage of methylation for an amniote #2025MMMdoi.org/10.1038/s415...
Sturgeons have undergone multiple whole-genome duplications, making some species octoploid (8x their original genome)! A. stellatus is a “low-ploidy” sturgeon, but its DNA still carries echoes of ancient duplications. #2025MMMdoi.org/10.1038/s415...
The genomes of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi reveal they have lost some metabolic pathways relative to free-living fungi. Kobayashi et al 2018 find that thiamine, vitamin B6, and some glucose-producing polysaccharide hydrolases biosynthesis is absent in AM #2025MMM#RIPdoi.org/10.1186/s128...
Glomeromycotina is a lineage of early diverging fungi that establish arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) symbiosis with land plants. Morin et al 2019 find that AM genomes contain a lot more species-specific genes than other fungi, which reflects their unique lifestyle #2025MMMdoi.org/10.1111/nph....
Zhao et al in 2019 sequenced 545 genomes of ginkgos and found 3 centers of genetic diversity in China. Ginkgos grown outside China trace their ancestry to the East population, and American and European trees carry genetic variation that is rare in wild populations. doi.org/10.1038/s414...#2025MMM
A fern genome contains all the instructions for two independent multi-cellular phases: a gametophyte (prothallus) and a sporophyte (fern). Yet, Marchant et al 2023 find only 273 and 1,397 genes were specifically expressed in the gametophyte and sporophyte #2025MMM#RIPdoi.org/10.1038/s414...
Ferns are the second most species-rich lineage of land plants. Fujiwara et al 2023 found that fern genome sizes have grown as fern have diversified, showing large structural complexity between different fern species due to whole genome duplications and polyploidy #2025MMMdoi.org/10.1093/aob/...
