Climate Change Spurs Rare Hybrid Between Blue Jay and Green Jay (cnn.com) 32
Researchers in Texas confirmed the first documented wild hybrid between a blue jay and a green jay -- a rare pairing that is likely a result of climate change and habitat shifts. Slashdot reader fjo3 shares a report from CNN: "We think it's the first observed vertebrate that's hybridized as a result of two species both expanding their ranges due, at least in part, to climate change," said Brian Stokes, a doctoral student of biology at the University of Texas at Austin and first author of the study published September 10 in the journal Ecology and Evolution. The vividly colored green jay is found in parts of South and Central America, Mexico and a limited portion of southern Texas. But since 2000, the tropical bird's territory has expanded north by hundreds of kilometers -- more than 100 miles and about 2 degrees of latitude -- along the Rio Grande and up toward San Antonio, said study coauthor Timothy Keitt.
Avid birders across Central Texas have taken note, sharing sightings of the emerald birds on social media and apps like eBird. Keitt, a professor of integrative biology at UT Austin, has been keeping tabs on their rapid northward creep since 2018. "They're pretty unmistakable in the field," he told CNN. "You see a green jay and you absolutely know that it's a green jay." Stokes joined Keitt's project a few years later, trapping birds to take blood samples for genetic analysis and releasing them back into the wild. While monitoring social media for green jay sightings in May 2023, Stokes came across an intriguing post on a Facebook group called Texbirds. A woman in a suburb of San Antonio shared a photo of an unusual bird that didn't look like any jay Stokes or Keitt had ever seen.
"He happened to notice that this person posted a picture of this odd jay, and immediately told me, and we got in the car and drove down to find it right away," Keitt said. He and Stokes described their finding as one of the "increasingly unexpected outcomes" that arise when global warming and land development converge to drive animal populations to new habitat ranges. This, they wrote, can lead to unpredictable animal interactions -- in this case, between a tropical species and a temperate one -- and create never-before-seen ecological communities.
Avid birders across Central Texas have taken note, sharing sightings of the emerald birds on social media and apps like eBird. Keitt, a professor of integrative biology at UT Austin, has been keeping tabs on their rapid northward creep since 2018. "They're pretty unmistakable in the field," he told CNN. "You see a green jay and you absolutely know that it's a green jay." Stokes joined Keitt's project a few years later, trapping birds to take blood samples for genetic analysis and releasing them back into the wild. While monitoring social media for green jay sightings in May 2023, Stokes came across an intriguing post on a Facebook group called Texbirds. A woman in a suburb of San Antonio shared a photo of an unusual bird that didn't look like any jay Stokes or Keitt had ever seen.
"He happened to notice that this person posted a picture of this odd jay, and immediately told me, and we got in the car and drove down to find it right away," Keitt said. He and Stokes described their finding as one of the "increasingly unexpected outcomes" that arise when global warming and land development converge to drive animal populations to new habitat ranges. This, they wrote, can lead to unpredictable animal interactions -- in this case, between a tropical species and a temperate one -- and create never-before-seen ecological communities.
Title: Climate Change: Now in HD Color (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
Cool (Score:5, Funny)
A Cyan Jay.
Re: (Score:2)
Missed it by that much.
Re: (Score:1)
No, the blue jays have been here all along. What it means is the warmer weather allows the green jays to follow the warmer climate north into Texas and mingle with the blue jays here.
Re: (Score:2)
A Cyan Jay.
I can't believe I wasn't the only one thinking it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's much more sinister than that: it's a Grue Jay.
Interesting, but meaningless (Score:2)
It's always interesting when we see a thing for the first time and (hopefully) properly document it, and perhaps even study it. This expands human knowledge and who knows what future benefit may come from the new information.
Sadly, it comes to us wrapped improperly in the propaganda of "climate change" alarmism. By dragging climate change into it, we're all supposed to see it as a warning sign of an impending apocalypse and it's likely intended to end-up as an argument in the related political fights. As wi
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Interesting, but meaningless (Score:2)
Recreational birdwatchers will gladly plop down thousands of dollars (those Swarovski binoculars ain't cheap!) and sit patiently for hours on end in horrible conditions just for the chance of spotting a rare and elusive species.
And the folks that -do- make money describing rare sightings and coming up with theories behind them? Those are wildlife biologists who have spent years of blood, sweat, and tears to earn PhDs and the true expertise need
Re: (Score:2)
"We have global climate data [and therefore, RECORDS] for something like 1/60000000 of the Earth's history and data on plants and animals of the entire world for even less of that. Indeed, we're STILL discovering species we never knew existed. Our records are simply INSIGNIFICANT in the big picture."
Not a fan of geologic science, I see. We have these brains, they can reason, we worked out what the climate was like in just about every epoch you can think of. And, get this, some of those epochs were very host
You missed my point. Re-read (Score:2)
You rant about fossils...so what. That has NOTHING to do with the argument, unless you are now claiming we have the fossilized remains of every single jay that ever existed and can, therefore prove that this is the very first instance of a naturally-occurring hybrid between a blue jay and a green jay in the history of the planet. You lack every single bird's remains, and therefore your argument is completely unrelated to what I said.
All of your religious ranting about the true faith of AGW also has no beari
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
It can be defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. Other ways of defining species include their karyotype, DNA sequence, morphology, behaviour, or ecological niche.
From the first paragraph here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: They must ahve a different idea of species (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Who said the cyan jay is fertile?
Did anyone say they were not?
Re: They must ahve a different idea of species (Score:1)
If the Blue Jay and Green Jay can interbreed and produce fertile offspring then they are not different species. That appears to be the case here unless theres some detail I'm missing.
Nobody knows yet whether the cross offspring is fertile or not. We'll have to wait and see if the cyan jay is able to breed to know. Tigers and lions can breed, but the offspring, ligers and tigons, can't.
Re: They must ahve a different idea of species (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
If they are the same species but with different plumage then seeing them interbreed to produce offspring that has a blue head and green wings than being completely blue or green then that is perhaps interesting for all kinds of reasons, but I'm thinking this interest should be pretty narrow.
It's even weirder. The result looks like a slightly lighter blue jay, but with a black face instead of white like a green jay has.
And forget species, currently these aren't even considered the same genus. But they likely have the same number of chromosomes, and apparently hybrids are possible, so the odds are in favor of it being a non-sterile hybrid, which means they are at least arguably becoming the same species, and the only reason they were not previously the same species was because their ranges did
Deforestization (Score:4, Interesting)
If we want to talk about habitats changing that affects birds, climate change is absolutely trivial compared to the deforestation that occurred in the late 1800s. The impact that had on birds was incredible. Even now, though large areas of forest lands have grown back, they are not the same kinds of trees, and have forever impacted the bird habitation regions across the US.
So I imagine there were many other new hybridizations that happened then because of human activity, where various species of birds began to overlap that hadn't before.
Are we still allowed to use the term Evolution? (Score:2)
haha the universal solvent (Score:2)
Climate change, the universal solvent. Solves all questions as to why something happened.