The parrot thing: Whenever there’s an under-used niche in a heavily populatednatural environment, at some point nature will fill it.
The famously diverse finches of the Galapagos are the classic example. There are so many finches and a finite amount of their favored diet of seeds that dozens of kinds have evolved to exploit every available food source. One has developed the ability to peck away at trees to eat the parasites under the bark. (An open ecological niche because there are no woodpeckers there.)
And the vampire finch gets its nourishment mainly from blood. It lights on the head or back of an animal, bites a hole, drinks the blood.
Charles Darwin first inventoried these finches during his famous world-circling voyage of biological discovery. He sketched the many varieties of finch beaks and these were influential in his formulation of the theory of change through natural selection.
As a group, they are still called Darwin’s Finched.
The parrot thing: Whenever there’s an under-used niche in a heavily populatednatural environment, at some point nature will fill it.
The famously diverse finches of the Galapagos are the classic example. There are so many finches and a finite amount of their favored diet of seeds that dozens of kinds have evolved to exploit every available food source. One has developed the ability to peck away at trees to eat the parasites under the bark. (An open ecological niche because there are no woodpeckers there.)
And the vampire finch gets its nourishment mainly from blood. It lights on the head or back of an animal, bites a hole, drinks the blood.
Charles Darwin first inventoried these finches during his famous world-circling voyage of biological discovery. He sketched the many varieties of finch beaks and these were influential in his formulation of the theory of change through natural selection.
As a group, they are still called Darwin’s Finched.