Acute sense of touch helps hummingbirds hover near a flower without bumping into it, study shows
Hummingbirds seem like a marvel of nature and engineering: a living creature that can hover near a flower with surgical precision. How do they do this?
Hummingbirds seem like a marvel of nature and engineering: a living creature that can hover near a flower with surgical precision. How do they do this?
Plants & Animals
May 29, 2024
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When babies learn to talk or birds learn to sing, the same principle applies: listen and then imitate. This is how the first babble becomes the first word or vocalization. Male zebra finch chicks initially memorize the song ...
Plants & Animals
Apr 17, 2024
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Humans aren't the only living beings who find a singing voice attractive in the opposite sex—songbirds do too. For about a third of the approximately 4,000 songbird species that sing only one song, the features that make ...
Plants & Animals
Apr 11, 2024
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Researchers with the University of Minnesota hope to release highly specialized parasitic wasps to serve as a biological control method to save Darwin's finches from a dire threat: the invasive avian vampire fly, Philornis ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 5, 2024
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Scientists are working hard to thwart a blood-sucking fly that is decimating populations of the charismatic finches that helped Charles Darwin formulate the theory of evolution.
Plants & Animals
Jan 23, 2024
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Using data on four species of Darwin's finches on the Galápagos Islands, researchers led by McGill University have confirmed a long-standing hypothesis that species diversity evolves through adaptation to different resources.
Evolution
Jan 8, 2024
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378
When humans learn to speak a language, we learn to produce new vocalizations and use them flexibly for communication, but how the brain is able to achieve this is an important but largely unanswered question, according to ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 8, 2023
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148
Walking through a town or city, you will encounter buildings with diverse shapes and sizes. These unique styles exist in part because the buildings were constructed by different architects, engineers and builders.
Plants & Animals
Nov 13, 2023
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203
When you went out today, did you see any birds? A galah perhaps, or a crow?
Plants & Animals
Nov 13, 2023
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Human activities like land-use changes and urban development have huge ecosystem impacts. Since organisms are shaped by their surroundings, how do they adapt during these times of upheaval? Answering this question requires ...
Ecology
Nov 9, 2023
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The true finches are passerine birds in the family Fringillidae. They are predominantly seed-eating songbirds. Most are native to the Northern Hemisphere, but one subfamily is endemic to the Neotropics, one to the Hawaiian Islands, and one subfamily – monotypic at genus level – is found only in the Palaearctic. The scientific name Fringillidae comes from the Latin word fringilla for the Chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs) – a member of that last subfamily – which is common in Europe.
Many birds in other families are also commonly called "finches", including some species in the very similar-looking waxbills or estrildid finches (family Passeridae, subfamily Estrildinae) of the Old World tropics and Australia; several groups of the bunting and American sparrow family (Emberizidae); and Darwin's finches of the Galapagos islands, which provided evidence of natural selection and are now recognized to be peculiar tanagers (Thraupidae).
Some species are being imported or smuggled into other countries and sold as exotic pets.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA