Manakins can move so quickly that they often appear only as blurs of blue or red as they flit along the rainforest floors of South and Central America. The males, known for their elaborate courtship rituals, snap their wings, spin around their rivals and even do backflips to woo potential partners.
Where do they get the energy. Previous studies have shown manakins possess fast-moving muscles and hearts that can manage short bursts of intense activity.
Now, genetic research suggests that these evolutionary adaptations were made possible by an important dietary change: Before they could dance, manakins had to be able to detect and digest sugary fruits.
“This is such a wonderful aspect of the study,” said Maude Baldwin, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence in Germany and an author of the study, which appeared on June 10 in Current Biology.
“We were able to dig into the evolutionary history of their relationship with fruit. ” The first bird genome was sequenced more than 20 years ago, gathered from a wild species of chicken known as red junglefowl.
The breakthrough gave researchers their first glimpse of avian genes and what they reveal about how birds experience the world. Notably, red junglefowl lacked a taste-receptor gene that had allowed birds earlier in evolutionary history to detect sweet flavors. (The gene is still present in mammals.
) Subsequent genetic research in other species confirmed that birds lost the taste receptor for sweetness back in the days of dinosaurs and were “ancestrally sweet-blind,” Dr. Baldwin said.
But some fruit and nectar eaters found their way to sweetness anyway: They gained the ability to taste plant sugars using the receptor that mammals use for savory, umami flavors.
The new study sequenced the genomes of five manakin species, and it confirmed that manakins can taste and easily digest sugar from the fruits they eat. This adaptation gave them access to the energy they need for their spectacular shows. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
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