Abstract
For decades, conservationists have considered Blue-winged Warblers to be a threat to Golden-winged Warblers, a species being considered for federal Endangered Species listing with populations that have declined 66 percent since 1968, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey.
The two species are known to frequently interbreed where they co-occur, and scientists have been concerned that the more numerous Blue-winged Warblers would genetically swamp the rarer golden-wing gene pool.
New research out of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Fuller Evolutionary Biology Program shows that, genetically speaking, Blue-winged and Golden-winged warblers are almost identical. The scientists behind the research say that the main differences between the two species are in feather color and pattern, in some cases just a simple matter of dominant or recessive pairings of alleles.
“We think we have finally pinpointed the proverbial genomic ‘needle in the haystack’ between these taxa,” says study co-author David Toews, who adds that the findings suggest conservationists should be less concerned with hybridization and primarily focused on preserving habitat for both species. “This is something that conservation practitioners have wanted for a very long time.”
The research is published in the September issue of the journal Current Biology by Toews and his fellow Cornell Lab postdoctoral researcher Scott Taylor, along with partners from Cornell University’s Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology, the University of California at Riverside, and Environment and...