New Bird Identified by 色情视频 Biologists and Collaborators
The vivid yellow Inti tanager was discovered in Bolivia and Peru.
After persuading his parents to bring home a bird feeder from his relatives鈥� hardware store, Kevin Burns became captivated by watching his avian visitors. He would flip through pages in a bulky encyclopedia to know which kind of bird was flitting about.鈥淚f we want to sustain ecosystems, we have to know all the players.鈥�
Now an ornithologist and professor of biology at 色情视频, Burns鈥檚 childhood fascination led him and his collaborators to identify a new bird, Heliothraupis oneilli, not previously described in any field guide.
The bird鈥檚 common name, the Inti tanager, is named after the word for sun in Quechua, the Indigenous language of the tropical mountainous area it inhabits, befitting of its vivid yellow feathers and tendency to sing during midday.
Burns鈥檚 colleagues from Louisiana State University first spotted the bird while leading a birdwatching tour over twenty years ago, in the foothills of the Andes mountains in Peru. But they were not able to collect enough genetic material to analyze until 2011 when they found additional Inti tanagers breeding in nearby Bolivia during the rainy season.
Burns and his graduate students then were able to analyze nearly 5,000 genes to understand how this bird fit into the puzzle of over 300 other species of tanagers, the second most diverse bird family.
When comparing the Inti tanager to species that shared the most genetic similarities, only some had yellow coloring and none had a bright orangey-pink beak. It is also very unusual for tanagers to migrate between tropical regions. The genetic analysis combined with the unique appearance and behaviors led to the decision to propose it as not only a new species but also a new genus.
When asked why a new genus and species of bird is important, Burns answered, 鈥淚f we want to sustain ecosystems, we have to know all the players.鈥�
He likened it to a mechanic trying to get a car going without knowing all the pieces of a car and what they do.
鈥淲e should care about biodiversity for a lot of reasons 鈥� philosophical, aesthetic reasons, but also practical reasons,鈥� said Burns. 鈥淎ll those creatures, birds or insects, they鈥檝e been evolving for millions of years and they鈥檝e been solving problems for millions of years that we might need to solve.鈥�
Additional unidentified species of flora and fauna may contain chemical compounds useful for treating disease or have special adaptations that can guide engineers in building more efficient machines based on evolution.
鈥淏irds are very well-known compared to other organisms. You鈥檇 think there鈥檚 not that much left to discover,鈥� said Shannon Hackett, the associate curator of birds for the Negaunee Integrative Research Center at the Field Museum in Chicago, who was not involved in identifying the Inti tanager. 鈥淪ome of the best ornithologists have been to these places all the time and never saw this bird.鈥�
鈥淭here鈥檚 always the idea that you could be that person, that you could capture lightning in a bottle. It fulfills the childhood curiosity to figure out something that nobody knew the day before and they did it with a pink-beaked bird,鈥� Hackett added.
The identification of the Inti tanager was reported in a that was recently published in Ornithology and the genetic analysis research was supported by the National Science Foundation.
