Sarah Wagner and I spent many months between 2009 and 2012 in Australia chasing honeyeaters around. We visited some mind-bendingly cool places during that time, but it wasn't just for fun. We were chasing and watching honeyeaters, recording what they were eating and how they were getting it. We eventually were able to do this for almost all of the species (we never were able to find sufficient individuals of the tricky Gray Honeyeater), and that dataset is now available here. We complemented the foraging dataset with a museum-based morphometric dataset, also freely available here. It took a few years, but we've finally managed to synthesize those datasets into a paper on the honeyeater ecomorphology, recently published at The American Naturalist. You can find a nice press release for the paper here. Put briefly, we found that morphology largely predicts ecology, but that arid-adapted honeyeaters, which come from a restricted subset of lineages, use their phylogenetically conserved morphology in novel ways. We suggest that certain lineages have managed to invade the recently (15 million years ago recent) created deserts, and that the species from these lineages are exploiting the ecological opportunity afforded by these new habitats by shaking what their mama gave them, even if it's not quite suited to the task--desert honeyeaters do more with less. You can see some clips I shot of honeyeater foraging on YouTube (embedded below), including some short clips of the notably arid-adapted Gibberbird and Orange Chat...although the shot of the Gibberbird doesn't show it doing much at all, much less "doing more with less". Check out that Orange Chat though! Looks more like an Orange Sandpiper-Honeyeater to me.
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AuthorNSF post-doctoral researcher studying species interactions Archives
April 2019
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