Reshuffled Rivers Bolster the Amazon’s Hyper-Biodiversity

The view from the window of a plane is amazing. Lukas Musher is a researcher at the academy of natural sciences.

The massive rivers below branch into a dense treelike network that has continually rearranged itself over hundreds of thousands of years. The forests are divided into spaces that are each an entire world for the innumerable creatures that swing, crawl, and fly.

According to a new study in the journal Science Advances, the endless reshuffling of rivers increases the diversity of birds in the Amazon. The Amazon forest could become one of the most biodiverse places on the planet if the dynamic rivers act as aspecies pump. 10 percent of all known species can be found in the forest's lowlands, which make up only half of the land area.

The idea that shifting rivers can affect bird speciation has been around since the 1960s, but most researchers have ignored it. A curator at the Field Museum in Chicago who was not involved in the study said that the rivers were thought to be static for a long time.

The biologists began to pay attention to the louder whispers from the geologists. The geologists began to think the rivers were dynamic and that was a thought provoking thing for biologists. He said that the way the paper weaves together biological and geological data is very neat.

One of the most contentious topics in evolutionary biology is the relationship between geographic change and the amount of flora and fauna. Some researchers think that Earth's history has little influence on the patterns of biodiversity, but others think that the relationship between the two is very close.

There is movement across time.

A group from the American Museum of Natural History and Louisiana State University went to Brazil in June of last year to study how river rearrangements might affect birds in the Amazon.

The Aripuan River and the Roosevelt River are both named after Teddy Roosevelt, who traveled there in 1914 with a mapping team. The samples were borrowed from other institutions.