A study on the evolution of bird nests conducted by National Chung Hsing University student Fang Yi-ting (方怡婷) and Academia Sinica researchers Tuanmu Mao-ning (端木茂甯) and Hung Chih-ming (洪志銘) has been published in an international journal, with Fang, 21, listed as the article’s first author.
The trio’s study, titled “Asynchronous evolution of interdependent nest characters across the avian phylogeny,” was published by Nature Communications on Monday last week.
Fang is a student at the university’s Department of Life Sciences, and Tuanmu and Hung are assistant research fellows at Academia Sinica’s Biodiversity Research Center.
Photo: Chu Pei-hsung, Taipei Times
Fang, who joined the research team in 2016, said she owes her accomplishment to Tuanmu and Hung’s guidance.
During the research process, she discovered many interesting things about nature, she said, adding that there are still many unsolved mysteries and she hopes to solve them one at a time.
The team used the Handbook of the Birds of the World for their research, Hung said.
Photo: Chien Hui-ju, Taipei Times
Fang organized and collected the data, he said, adding that it was a time-consuming task, especially since the information was constantly being updated and had to be reanalyzed.
While he and Tuanmu came up with the ideas, Fang executed them, Hung said.
Fang was thorough and fast in her data collection, he said, adding that she deserved to be listed as the first author.
Previous studies have not has as broad a scope, Hung said on Friday when speaking about the study’s significance.
Furthermore, previous studies usually looked at a single characteristic, he said, adding that their study’s examination of the evolution of three bird nest characteristics was more comprehensive.
While previous studies could only guess at the relationship between bird nests and avian phylogeny, their study contained more evidence to prove that bird nest evolution and avian phylogeny are closely related, Hung said.
Originally, all birds nested on the ground, but after dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago, large areas emptied up on the Earth, so to ensure their survival, birds began building nests with different structures, he said.
Then, 30 million to 40 million years ago, birds experienced a second adaptive radiation — the process in which organisms diversify rapidly from an ancestral species into a multitude of new forms — and began building more complex structures, such as domed or cup-shaped nests, and developed different approaches to attaching their nests to things, he said.
The evidence shows that, apart from being important in the production of offspring, bird nests are a significant part of the evolution of bird species, Hung added.
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