At 7:00 p.m., President Debbie Mullins called the Society meeting to order.
President Mullins noted the fascinating number of rare bird sightings in the area over the past month, including the astounding appearance of the Red-flanked Bluetail in New Jersey. This bird is from Russia and typically winters in southeast Asia. The Black-chinned Hummingbird is still on Randall’s Island thanks to the Parks Department, which has provided a feeding station. In Manhattan, there have been reports of Ash-throated Flycatchers, Dickcissel, and a Western Tanager. Long Island reports list a Tufted duck and a Yellow-rumped Warbler of the Audubon’s subspecies. Additional notable birds include a Mountain Bluebird, several Orange-crowned Warblers, and Painted Buntings.
President Mullins reminded all LSNY members to renew their annual membership online or by mailing a check.
Motion 1: President Mullins then announced the result of the online vote to approve the October 2023 members’ meeting minutes. The vote passed with 130 votes in favor, none opposed, and two abstaining.
Motion 2: The Society welcomed the following two new members, with 132 members voting in favor and none opposed.
- Kenelma Perez, Active Membership, Sponsored by Mary Beth Kooper
- Savannah Conheady, Active Membership, Sponsored by Mary Beth Kooper
At 7:05 p.m., President Mullins introduced the speaker, Dr. Brian T. Smith.
Dr. Brian T. Smith
Brian T. Smith is the curator-in-charge of the Department of Ornithology and associate professor at the Richard Gilder Graduate School of the American Museum of Natural History; he holds adjunct appointments at Columbia University and the City University of New York. He received his B.S. degree and Ph.D. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum. Dr. Smith was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science. He leads an active research group that conducts expeditionary fieldwork to study the evolution of birds using genomics and specimen-based techniques. By studying birds from around the globe, Dr. Smith aims to discover the patterns and, ultimately, the processes that underlie the origins of birds. He is a proponent of using the global museum to play a fundamental role in the study of biodiversity in the past and present and to build awareness about the natural world and the threats it faces.
Insights into Avian Evolution from Natural History Collections
Dr. Brian Smith began the evening by sharing the vital ornithology work at the AMNH that happens behind the scenes of the public-facing museum. Recent advances in genomic sequencing technology have provided an unprecedented window into the evolution of living birds, and the historical avian collection housed at the AMNH is vital for this contemporary research.
In this presentation, Dr. Smith explored these advances by presenting an overview of his research program, using a series of vignettes to show the demography of extinction in North American birds, adaptation in woodpeckers, the evolutionary history of parrots, and efforts to complete the avian tree of life.
Active research projects
A recent project is a joint venture with the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City to conduct surveys and collect DNA samples in Finca Irlanda and Chiquihuites, both in Chiapas, Mexico. Each location has rich bird diversity, including indigenous and migrating birds. Notable in Finca Irlanda were the Red-legged Honeycreeper and the White-eared Ground-sparrow. Chiquihuites, an active volcano, is the second-highest peak in Central America. The area has distinct elevation bands, each with its own bird species and food sources. The notable species include the Azure-rumped Tanager, Common Chlorospingus, Horned Guan, and Pink-headed Warbler. Well-known migrants include the Black-and-white Warbler, Indigo Bunting, and Tennessee Warbler.
This project is representative of the type of work done at the AMNH. It is essential because it results in modern inventories of birds, provides training opportunities for the next generation of naturalists, and strengthens relationships with international partners that reflect the state of contemporary museum research.
AMNH ornithology collection
The ornithology collection at the AMNH is extensive and includes more than 867,754 individual species covering 100% of the families, 99.1% of the genera, and 93.6% of all bird species. The collection grows by about one thousand specimens per year. Each year, the AMNH lends an average of 62 samples and is featured in 66 publications that leverage data from the collection.
Visiting scholars and other student groups use the collection on an ongoing basis.
Ornithological collections are important because each species has a unique evolutionary history, with genetic variations distributed across the landscape and distinctive interactions with external factors. The team at the AMNH is trying to understand these patterns and how they have arisen.
The three main areas of work are phylogeography, the study of the geographic distributions of genealogical lineages over time; phylogenomics, the family trees of each species; and, where it exists, historical DNA derived from rare samples that are often a century old.
Genetic variation in desert birds
It is well known that birds exhibit broad patterns of genetic variation across ranges and species. Genomes contain clear signatures that help explain how birds have evolved across landscapes. Because of contemporary technology, we can understand why a particular bird shows a particular pattern based on how it is distributed across the landscape, significantly when land barriers restrict it.
One of the many projects of the AMNH is the study of the genetic variation of birds found in the wetter Sonoran Desert versus those of the same species in the drier and more extreme Chihuahuan Desert, separated by the Cochise Filter Barrier. Variation is found in four arenas: first, in the present-day environment; second, by geographic distance; third, through paleo-climate history; and finally, through observing abundance. Researchers have identified informative genetic patterns across these differing landscapes and now have statistical data to allow modeling that determines the most critical factors in explaining genetic differences among populations.
Adaptation in woodpeckers
Another benefit of the AMNH collection is that museum specimens can be used in novel ways to address outstanding questions. An exciting project that the collection allowed is the convergent evolution of Hairy and Downy woodpeckers. These birds look nearly identical but are not sister species. They split from a common ancestry over eight million years ago. They mostly live in overlapping territories, and differences within the species are often similar. In the west, they tend to be darker, and in the north, they tend to be larger. This study’s conclusions show that Hairy and Downy Woodpeckers show signs of convergent evolution, including plumage color: they use different molecular pathways to produce similar phenotypes.
Avian tree of life
A third project is the study of the evolutionary history of birds. The team used century-old museum specimens of extinct birds, isolated their DNA, collected genome-wide markers, and characterized the models of their demographichistories. It was determined that the most likely reason for the rapid extension of multiple species of birds was human intervention.
A recent study of parrots was conducted in the Caribbean, combining archeology and paleontology to survey the sub-fossil record of Amazon parrots. DNA from the fossils was sequenced and compared to that of living parrots. The mainfinding was that there was a much more comprehensive and widely dispersed array of species before human colonization.
The evolutionary tree for parrots is now 96% complete, and taxonomic revisions are taking place. Renaming helps create logical names consistent with their location in the tree based on DNA analysis.
Conclusions
Dr. Smith noted that traditional museum research is now more critical than ever. Cutting-edge technology has created the space for new types of research, international collaborations, and the opportunity to train the next generation of scientists. These studies show that missing branches on the avian tree of life can now be confidently and rapidly resolved. He further argued the importance of natural history collections for the continued documentation of biodiversity for current and future generations.
At the close of the evening, after a fascinating Q&A session hosted by Vice President Douglas Futuyma, the Linnaean Society expressed its appreciation to Dr. Smith for sharing the engaging projects and important results produced by the AMNH team.