It looks as if today is Bird Monday. I got a link to this Mental Floss post in an email from Matthew that he titled “Christ these things are weird”. And so they are. The Floss’s explanation:
Gouldian Finches [Erythrura gouldiae], are beautifully colorful birds native to the Australian coast. As adults, they’re stunningly beautiful—but they don’t start out that way. Gouldian finch babies are, in a word, horrifying.
The hatchlings are born with reflective blue beads on their beaks that look like tiny, creepy pearls. The bright nodules help parents see and distinguish their babies in the dark; when the babies open their tiny, nightmarish mouths, the parents see the flashing blue and know it’s time to feed them. The video above shows 3-day-old chicks waiting to be fed.
About a month after being born, the babies grow a nice feather coat, and they look a lot less like Mongolian Death Worms.
Actually, I don’t find them that weird; evolutionists see a lot weirder stuff! And their name comes not from Steve Gould, but from the famous British ornithologist John Gould (1804-1881), famous for identifying “Darwin’s finches” as real finches (Darwin had misidentified them as diverse and unrelated species).
The head-twisting may well be an adaptation to call attention to their mouths, which they want stuffed.
Here are some being hand fed. Lord, do they make a racket!
The adults, however, are some of the most beautiful and colorful birds in the world. They’re also known as “rainbow finches,” and there is some slight sexual dimorphism. Which one of these is the male?
They’re endangered because of habitat loss (tropical savannah woodland), and are now bred in captivity, where breeders cannot resist looking for color variants. Here’s their natural range:
“They’re endangered because of habitat loss”
I think habitat loss is a euphemism for too many damn people.
Those videos take me back to when my kids were adolescents and had their pals over, and I would come home from work with take-out. 🙂
The bird on the left has brighter colored feathers, so I think that’s the male.
Peep
“Christ these things are weird”
I agree that those birds are weird but do we really need to interject religion to explain this? I’m new to this website so I’m not sure how common this kind of accomaditionism is here, but I’d really like to see less of it in science publications nowadays.
Umm. . . I think you’re on the wrong website. I suggest you go elsewhere.
Poe? … or no Poe?
The weirdness of bird feeding systems (the signal system of open chick beaks) is only surpassed by the weirdness of various mammal systems (sucking various outlets).
Which of course is again only surpassed by the weirdness of adult animal food rituals. (“Pass the carrion! Wait for the alpha individual! Regurgitate the food!”) If it isn’t weird, it likely isn’t biology.
I wonder if the bold contrasting colors serves a dual purpose of putting off predators. It’s like a low-light aposematic display.
Interestingly, female gouldian finches can determine the sex of their offspring by choosing their mate according to his head colour. Gouldians are polymorphic with respect to head colour, these being red, yellow and black.
Red dominates black: agonistic signalling among head morphs in the colour polymorphic Gouldian finch
It is also my understanding that the wild populations are showing signs of recovery after the reduction of purposeful burns in their habitat to control “weeds” which destroyed many food producting plants.
Also affecting the viability of wild populations is the presence of the air-sac mite which more than likely escaped into the from canaries.
My father was quite a successful breeder of gouldians, and he communicated widely with bird-disease experts, his own professional speciality being the genes involved in the red colouration of apples. At his funeral a friend of his said that my father was a renowned expert on air-sac mites. Whether that was true I don’t know, but in his communications with american apple researchers, he was by them accorded the honorific “Professor” in their correspondence with him, because, he said, they considered the research he was doing was of professorial standard. Not bad for a man trained in horticulture to only a college level.
“female gouldian finches can determine the sex of their offspring by choosing their mate according to his head colour.”
That raises an interesting point – doubtless they *could* so choose, but do they? That is, has anyone ever found a way to check whether female finches do have a preference for a particular sex of offspring?
(I have no idea how one would do that, but biologists are so ingenious…)
cr
No idea. But there is I think precedent that if sex ratios drift in one direction, then the selective advantage goes to members of the opposite sex.
I reckon they were more widely distributed in the past & that the isolated populations are relics of a past when this area was wetter – ice age maximum?..
RELICTS! Sorry…
Do those beads on the beak eventually fall off, wear out, get absorbed? What happens to them?
Blimey ! they look a lot worse in the first Video.lol