Posted on 10/31/2010 5:11:44 AM PDT by Palter
The extinct Passenger Pigeon, once the most numerous bird species in the world, has had its closest living relatives identified by DNA extracted from museum specimens.
The Passenger Pigeon was a forest nomad, breeding in vast colonies and following sporadic crops of acorns and chestnuts around the dense deciduous forests of the eastern and central United States. the forests were once so vast that they could support tens of millions of the birds, which were known to form flocks so huge that they darkened the sky when dispersing. This made them easy prey for hunters' guns, and the greed and over-exploitation of hunters and wholesale destruction of their habitat led to their shockingly rapid extinction.
The last individual, named Martha, died in Cincinnati Zoo on 1 September 1914, though it was actually born and raised in captivity and the last wild bird was recorded in Ohio in January 1900.
Mitochondrial DNA from a separate organelle in the cell than the nucleus, which has its own rapidly-evolving genome making it useful for detecting evolutionary rates and relationships, was analysed from Passenger Pigeon specimens at three North American museums. It was compared to samples of the same gene segments from 79 other species of pigeon and dove. Not only did this reveal the relationships of the extinct bird, but it also showed that American columbids may have originated from a colonisation event from South-East Asia, probably arriving when sea levels were lower over the Bering Strait, prior to the Pleistocene.
The analysis also showed three clear Nearctic clades, probably indicating at least two separate colonisation events. However, the most basal clade in the Columbidae, the Columbina Ground Doves, is American, and it is therefore possible that pigeons and doves may have originated in the Americas, dispersed to Eurasia, and then dispersed back again.
Passenger Pigeon was previously thought to be most closely related to Mourning Dove, a familiar and common North American bird, but the new analysis has shown that it was in fact closer to Band-tailed Pigeon Patagioenas fasciata, and both are in an endemic New world sister group to the Eurasian Columba and Streptopelia pigeons and doves. Interestingly, Band-tailed Pigeon also shares a louse species with its extinct relative, further supporting the relationship.
However, the Passenger Pigeon was so different to all other columbids that it remains the sole representative of its own genus Ectopistes, a unique and diverged lineage that has now disappeared forever. It is, however, speculated in some quarters that DNA from museum specimens may one day be used to clone the species, but this is certainly unachievable for the foreseeable future. The story of the Passenger Pigeon remains one of the most chilling examples of what can happen to a robust and widespread species and habitat if they are exploited without restraint.
The full paper is cited as: Johnson, K P, Clayton, D H, Dumbacher, J P and Fleischer, R C (2010). The Flight of the Passenger Pigeon: Phylogenetics and Biogeographic History of an Extinct Species. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 58: 455-458.
'may have originated from a colonisation event from South-East Asia, probably arriving when sea levels were lower over the Bering Strait, prior to the Pleistocene.
The analysis also showed three clear Nearctic clades, probably indicating at least two separate colonisation events. However, the most basal clade in the Columbidae, the Columbina Ground Doves, is American, and it is therefore possible that pigeons and doves may have originated in the Americas, dispersed to Eurasia, and then dispersed back again. '
Different FROM!
May have ... could have ... probably ... we now think ...
All will be presented and accepted as irrefutable fact, until some conflicting fact emerges.
I bet those flocks left a mess behind, too...
Just saying...
They are INCOMPATIBLE with our current critter structure.
Of note these guys left HUGE deposits of pigeon droppings that even today can infect you with histoplasmosis should you break into one.
Having spoken with people who remembered the death of the last Passenger Pigeon they were still cheering that event!
We have a small flock of birds that roost and live around my backyard that don’t seem to be 100% common dove or pigeon. They are bigger than common doves but don’t look like the pigeons I used to feed in Chattanooga when I was a kid.
You could get a picture and talk to a local nature center. We have “stinkin’ starlings” that leave their marks everywhere. AAAaaaaarrrrrggggggghhhhh.
As residents of many large cities understand, pigeons are rats with wings. The immense flocks of carriers made living in the east and southeast forests tenuous at best. They were a disease ridden vermin deliberately eradicated for the safety and well being of humans and other native species. There are species of animals that need to be eradicated. This was one.
Even today wildlife biologists sometimes come across isolated animal populations thought to have been extinct for a long time.
It's now known that Coelocanth, thought to have been extinct, actually live and breed in very deep water across the breadth of the Indian Ocean, south of the Equator.
They like to drink at my water garden and eat my dog’s food. They are bigger than Doves but seem to be smaller than pigeons. I’ll see if I can get pictures. They seem to be pretty tame. They also don’t COO exactly like a Dove.
Don’t tell Amos in post #9. He’s liable to show up and shoot them!
We now know more about this bird's birth than the president's.
I saw some pigeons in Glenwood Springs a few yrs. ago while visiting my son. Don’t recall the species. My son is the birder and knew what they were.
Being an Eastern city boy it struck me to see them in forest trees. I’m used to seeing pigeons in parks, sidewalks, etc.
Pretty wary birds also.
British usage is “different to”. It’s OK, it sort of bands them so they stand out.
Oh, *British*!
LOL
We can only imagine the size of the problem, since no known species of birds massed in such HUGE FLOCKS This is from wikipedia's 1st paragraph on passenger pigeons:
It lived in enormous migratory flocks – sometimes containing more than two billion birds – that could stretch one mile (1.6 km) wide and 300 miles (500 km) long across the sky, sometimes taking several hours to pass.And as bad as the droppings of a flock 1 mile wide and 300 miles long (thick enough to block-out the sun) could be, even worse was their destruction of huge areas of farm crops and the devastation this left for many communities.
In smaller numbers they may have been harmless, but in the numbers they naturally existed, they were locust with feathers.
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