Sentences with phrase «passenger pigeon population»

Analysis of Passenger Pigeon population genomics is completed and the findings released in prepublished format on Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's biorxiv preprint server.

By comparing the genes from each bird, Hung's team was able to determine how the overall passenger pigeon population had changed over the years.

All this unfettered felling and trapping meant that by the end of the 19th century — around the time that passenger pigeon populations began to plummet — the wild turkey was in trouble.

It is important to the de-extinction effort because it shows (as our data do) that passenger pigeon populations fluctuated in size through time, as resource availability changed.

As more and more hunters took advantage of this cheap flying protein, passenger pigeon populations plummeted.

Not exact matches

With this map of genetic variation in hand, the scientists could then estimate how big the population of passenger pigeons once was — typically, a small population will have less genetic variation than a larger one because it derives from a smaller pool of ancestors who bred successfully.

But the fact that passenger pigeons persisted at relatively small population sizes gives fresh hope to efforts to bring them back — so - called de-extinction.

In the case of the passenger pigeon, Hung and his colleagues concluded that the population of breeding birds was roughly 330,000 on average, falling to as few as 50,000 birds at points in the last million years.

This mismatch between these numbers and 1880 estimates of at least three billion suggests that the passenger pigeon may have been what is known to ecologists as an «outbreak» species, like locusts, that boom and bust with changes in conditions, rather than a species that experiences a singular population explosion, as Homo sapiens has in the last 200 years.

It's also unclear which biological properties of the passenger pigeons made them so prone to population fluctuations.

We used DNA sequences from 42 Passenger Pigeons spanning 4,000 years of history to reconstruct historic population trends.

This result suggests that the passenger pigeon was not always super abundant but experienced dramatic population fluctuations, resembling those of an «outbreak» species.

The paper maps passenger pigeon genetic data to a published genome from the Rock dove, Columba livia, and uses these data to infer changes in their population size through time.

Based on our results, we hypothesize that ecological conditions that dramatically reduced population size under natural conditions could have interacted with human exploitation in causing the passenger pigeon's rapid demise.

The passenger pigeon was once the most abundant bird in the world, with a population size estimated at 3 — 5 billion in the 1800s; its abrupt extinction in 1914 raises the question of how such an abundant bird could have been driven to extinction in mere decades.

Our study illustrates that even species as abundant as the passenger pigeon can be vulnerable to human threats if they are subject to dramatic population fluctuations, and provides a new perspective on the greatest human - caused extinction in recorded history.

Applying high - throughput sequencing technologies to obtain sequences from most of the genome, we calculated that the passenger pigeon's effective population size throughout the last million years was persistently about 1/10, 000 of the 1800's estimated number of individuals, a ratio 1,000 - times lower than typically found.

Therefore unique diversity is not evolutionarily significant for discovering the traits that make a passenger pigeon (though they will be important later for developing genetic diversity in a viable population).

In collaboration with Ben Novak's dietary ecology research, Holland has conducted several field experiments to identify the necessary population densities of Passenger Pigeons and to gain insight regarding seed dispersal.

Project leader Ben Novak begins researching the historical ecology of the Passenger pigeon, starting with population genetics studying the paleoecology of eastern N. American forests.

Their analysis of the passenger pigeon's genome is the first study to reveal how natural selection and genetic recombination shape a genome in an abundant population, as was the passenger pigeon's before the arrival of European settlers to North America.

The Passenger Pigeon's genome may hold the answers to the true minimum population size necessary for a viable population.

Through studying population genetics, we can evaluate historic accounts with a more accurate understanding of Passenger Pigeon ecology.

The recent trends in population size were gained using complete mitochondrial genome sequences of of 41 passenger pigeons (three of which date to 4,000 years old).

This low diversity means that passenger pigeons would have needed to be conserved as a one contiguous population, not a fragmented one.

The idea is that Passenger Pigeons evolved to live in huge flocks and became dependent on their large flocks, meaning they could not produce enough offspring to survive unless there were billions of them, either for social reasons (they would not breed in small flocks), for predator reasons (they could not satiate predators without huge flocks), or for resource reasons (they could not find adequate food sources in small populations).

Our current population genetics analyses show that the Passenger Pigeon was stably abundant for tens of thousands of years, before humans arrived in North America.

It was Dr. Beth Shapiro, an expert in ancient DNA and ancient population genetics at UC Santa Cruz, who first sequenced passenger pigeon DNA in 2002.

The overall goal of this phase is to produce a parent generation of chimeras and a first generation stock population of fully edited birds — the new passenger pigeons.

Therefore unique diversity is not evolutionarily significant for discovering the traits that make a passenger pigeon (though they will be important later for developing genetic diversity in a viable population).

The book's author, H. Bruce Franklin, compares menhaden to the passenger pigeon and related to me recently how his research uncovered that populations were once so large that «the vanguard of the fish's annual migration would reach Cape Cod while the rearguard was still in Maine.»

Seeing how much passenger pigeon DNA varied among individuals over time can give him and his colleagues some clues to the size of the pigeon population over the past few thousand years.