Most bird species have smaller genomes and fewer repeats than mammals. Chicken Repeat 1 (CR1) repeat is one of the most abundant families of repeats, ranging from ~133,000 to ~187,000 copies accounting for ~50 to ~80% of the interspersed repeats in the zebra finch and chicken genomes, respectively. CR1 repeats are believed to have arisen from the retrotransposition of a small number of master e...

Se trata de un ensayo sobre la decepción, en el sentido que Montaigne dio a palabra “ensayo”, cuya inspiración procede del libro Javier Lucas Nosotros quisimos tanto Atticus Finch, 2020 (§ 1). Luego se hace una breve exploración concepto intentándolo diferenciar indicativamente nociones próximas, como las desengaño, desilusión o desencanto 2). Sucesivamente analizan principales formas aparece d...

Sensory systems are predicted to be adapted the perception of important stimuli, such as signals used in communication. Prior work has shown that female zebra finches perceive carotenoid-based orange-red coloration male beaks—a mate choice signal—categorically. Specifically, females exhibited an increased ability discriminate between colors from opposite sides a perceptual category boundary tha...

Hummingbird flight muscle is estimated to have among the highest mass-specific power output among vertebrates, based on aerodynamic models. However, little is known about the fundamental contractile properties of their remarkable flight muscles. We hypothesized that hummingbird pectoralis fibers generate relatively low force when activated in a tradeoff for high shortening speeds associated wit...

Phylogeographical studies are common in boreal and temperate species from the Palaearctic, but scarce in arid-adapted species. We used nuclear and mitochondrial markers to investigate phylogeography and to estimate chronology of colonization events of the trumpeter finch Bucanetes githagineus, an arid-adapted bird. We used 271 samples from 16 populations, most of which were fresh samples but in...

FINCH is a methodology for evolving Java bytecode, enabling the evolution of extant, unrestricted Java programs, or programs in other languages that compile to Java bytecode. The established approach in genetic programming (GP) involves the definition of functions and terminals appropriate to the problem at hand, after which evolution of expressions using these definitions takes place. FINCH ev...

Birds can be classified into altricial and precocial. The hatchlings of altricial birds are almost naked, whereas those of precocial birds are covered with natal down. This regulatory divergence is thought to reflect environmental adaptation, but the molecular basis of the divergence is unclear. To address this issue, we chose the altricial zebra finch and the precocial chicken as the model ani...

Hybrid speciation is increasingly recognized as a mechanism for novel evolutionary trajectories. However, we know very little about the ecology of a contact zone that has arisen in sympatry. This study examines the foraging behavior and fitness of two species of Darwin’s tree finches (Camarhynchus parvulus, C. pauper) and hybrid offspring on Floreana Island. Previous study showed that the perce...

Finch trichomonosis, caused by the protozoal parasite Trichomonas gallinae, was first recognized as an emerging infectious disease of British passerines in 2005. The first year of seasonal epidemic mortality occurred in 2006 with significant declines of greenfinch Carduelis chloris and chaffinch Fringilla coelebs populations. Here, we demonstrate that large-scale mortality, principally of green...

Passeriformes are the largest order of birds and one of the most widely studied groups in evolutionary biology and ecology. Until recently genomic tools in passerines relied on chicken genomic resources. Here we report the construction and analysis of a whole-genome linkage map for the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) using a 354-bird pedigree. The map contains 876 SNPs dispersed across 45 lin...