John Avise is here for his Sunday installment of bird photos. John’s notes and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the pictures by clicking on them.
Eastern Mexico Birds
The very first scientific paper I ever published (essentially my Masters Thesis from the University of Texas in 1972) dealt with the genetics of blind Mexican cavefish in the genus Astyanax. Nearly 40 years later, the evolution of these eyeless and unpigmented fish from their fully-eyed surface ancestors had become a hot topic in evolutionary genetics, with literally dozens of researchers now involved. In 2011, I was invited to give an introductory lecture at a special Astyanax conference held near Tampico and Veracruz, Mexico. This week’s post shows several of the bird species that I managed to photograph on the venue’s grounds during this three-day-long event.
Altamira Oriole (Icterus gularis):
American Kestrel (Falco sparverius):
Black-bellied Whistling-ducks (Dendrocygna autumnalis):
Brown Jay (Psilorhinus morio):
Clay-colored Robin (Turdus grayi):
Double-crested Cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus):
Golden-fronted Woodpecker (Melanerpes aurifrons):
Gray Hawk (Buteo nitidus):
Great Kiskadee (Pitangus sulphuratus):
Hooded Oriole (Ictalurus cucullatus):
Louisiana Waterthrush (Seiurus moticilla):
Melodious Blackbird (Dives dives):
Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottus):
Social Flycatcher (Myiozetetes similis):
Turquoise-browed Motmot (Eumomota superciliosa):
Morelet’s Seedeater (Sporophila torqueola):
White-eyed Vireo (Vireo griseus):
Ahh – perfection.
Morelet’s seedeater’s tail looks interesting……
I think that you meant the marmot. Names are above the photos.
Great pictures, but please tell us more about the blind cavefish. I loved having them in my aquarium as a teenager. They were exotic and interesting.
Yes, fantastic photos but I too would like to hear about the cavefish.
Thank you!
The motivation for my cavefish study was to test the hypothesis that the magnitude of genetic variation in a population might be related to the level of environmental heterogeneity. At that time, caves were thought to be one of the most environmentally homogeneous environments on Earth (the other being the deep sea), with both showing temperature uniformity and complete darkness year-round. So, I used newly-introduced protein-electrophoretic (allozyme) methods to assesss whether the cavefish populations were indeed genetically depauperate. And it turned out that they were; they showed extremely low levels of heterozygosity (genetic variation). However, several detailed aspects of the data led me to conclude that the paucity of genetic variation in the cavefish was likely due to inbreeding accompanied by genetic drift in the small cavefish populations, rather than to environmental homogeneity per se. My thesis was the first multi-locus protein-electrophoretic study on any fish, and one of the first such studies on any animal species other than fruit flies and humans. Later work on these cavefish populations by other laboratories also showed that the blindness and unpigmented conditions of these fish have evolved independently on multiple occasions (i.e., that they are polyphyletic rather than monophyletic). Many other researchers are now trying to figure out the precise molecular-genetic basis of the blind and unpigmented conditions in various populations of these amazing fish.
Thank you once again for wonderful photos–such colorful birds to brighten a dull Sunday morning.
Lovely set of photos. Thanks.
Beautiful! Brings back memories of Belize. I love the racquet tail of the motmot.
Lovely close-ups. More than a few of those birds make their way up to AZ. Like the others, I’m wowed by the motmot. The turquoise around the eye is stunning.
Jerry, are all the Reader’s Wildlife posts catalogued/accessible in one spot where we can have a gander?
You can peruse any or all of my bird photos on the web by googling “Avise’s Birds of the World”, or by clicking here: http://avise-birds.bio.uci.edu/index.html
Thank you for your response. And for sharing! What a treat.
Thanks for the photos. I am pleased that I have been able to see all of these species. Some in the US, some in Central America.
And thank you for the link to your photos webpage.
Hi John! These terrific Southwestern bird photos are a treat, as always, but hearing about your research on cavefish evolution in the heady early days of electrophoresis was even better. Thank you for this cool post (and sorry for being late, as I just straggled in from a desert trip).
Thanks for the awesome photos!
And thank you Dr. Coyne for managing, editing, updating, and doing everything else involved with WEIT!!