Stephen was out in the woods of Western Pennsylvania when he heard the song of the scarlet tanager. The blood-red bird with black wings and tail is a favorite among birders for its beauty and rarity as the birds prefer to remain hidden high in the forest canopy.
The songbird looked like a rose-breasted grosbeak but it sounded like a scarlet tanager. A team from the National aviary in Pittsburgh arrived soon after to catch the bird and take a blood sample.
A team of researchers led by Penn State was able to use a combination ofgenomics and song analysis to identify a rare hybrid bird, whose ancestors haven't shared the same breeding location for 10 million years. Their work has been published.
David Toews is the lead author of the study and assistant professor of biology at Penn State.
A female rose-breasted grosbeak and a male scarlet tanager meet in a strange way. Researchers don't know how and where they met, as the two species prefer different environments. While rose-breasted grosbeaks are happy in the open along the edges of the woods, tanagers prefer the canopy cover. For at least 10 million years, the two species have been on different evolutionary paths, but now they are on the same path.
The male offspring of a rose-breasted grosbeak and scarlet tanager was the first documented hybrid of its kind. His origin story was not well known.
Toews had a lot of techniques that could be used to solve the mystery. They could get a sample from the blood. They could solve the mystery of the bird's origin if they combined audio and genetic material.
Nature and nurture were analyzed in their methodology. Songbirds learn to sing from their dads. How they were raised can be revealed in their vocalizations.
She was the one who laid the egg and sat on the nest. The two species prefer different habitats, so we don't know where that would have been. Wherever it was, her pair stayed around long enough for the young offspring to learn something.
The researchers used a method called bioacoustic analysis to confirm that the vocalizations they captured matched the song of a scarlet tanager.
We aren't actually listening to the birds when we analyze them. We're looking at them. We're measuring visual components of a sound wave to analyze it, and we're looking at wavelengths of the sound.
After the vocalizations were confirmed, the team turned to the genetics of the hybrid. The grosbeak mother and tanager father were confirmed by nature.
"We used the same tools that we've used to identify other hybrid, but we usually have more ambiguous answers that are a bit more complex," said Toews. We were able to identify the species. At the end of the day, we know who the parents were. This story is more than just your average ornithological nerd.
More information: David P. L. Toews et al, Genetic confirmation of a hybrid between two highly divergent cardinalid species: A rose‐breasted grosbeak ( Pheucticus ludovicianus ) and a scarlet tanager ( Piranga olivacea ), Ecology and Evolution (2022). DOI: 10.1002/ece3.9152 Journal information: Ecology and Evolution
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