Adaptation to changing environments enables any living thing to survive in the race of struggle for existence. The recent study conducted by the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath has endorsed it. The researchers found that diving birds may be more prone to extinction than non-diving birds.
The study, reported by ANI, explains that the diving birds like penguins, puffins and cormorants are highly specialised, which makes them less able to adapt to changing environments in comparison to non-diving birds.
The diving ability seems to be rare in birds, with less than a third of the 727 species of water bird opting the diving method to hunt for food.
Joshua Tyler and Dr Jane Younger, evolutionary scientists, worked hard to learn the evolution of diving in modern waterbirds. They investigated how diving impacted their body: the physical characteristics of the birds (morphology); how the species evolved to increase diversity (rate of speciation); and how prone the species were to extinction.
According to the study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the diving evolved independently 14 times, and that once a group of birds got the ability to dive, subsequent evolution didn’t change this trait. The scientists discovered that body size amongst the diving birds had evolved differently depending on what way they dived.
Penguins and puffins amongst other wing divers propel themselves through the water with the help of their wings. Such birds tend to develop larger body size for adaptation for swimming.
Birds like cormorants which do “foot dive” kick their feet to swim. They have also got larger body size as the wing divers have evolved it for diving.
In contrast, the researchers found that species like “plunge divers” tended to be more restricted in their body size, as they were better adapted for flying than swimming.
The study found no major difference in speciation rate for diving birds and non-diving species. The researchers also observed that many diving birds seemed to be more prone to extinction than non-diving species, ANI reported.
Conservationists may use the techniques that the researchers applied to predict which species are most at risk of extinction from an evolutionary perspective.
“Our work shows that rather than being a random process, there are predictable patterns to evolution. Waterbirds were grouped together as being highly related following genetic analysis of the bird family tree in 2015, so I wanted to investigate how evolving to be able to dive had affected their body shape, niche adaptation and evolutionary diversity,” said Josh Tyler, first author of the paper and PhD student at the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath.
