Museum Quarterly LSU Museum of Natural Science May 2014 Volume 32, Issue 2 Letter from the Director... Museum of After a cold and long winter, Spring is finally back in Natural Science Baton Rouge, with the first waves of Neotropical migrants Director and moving through. I was treated this past weekend to a male Curators Cerulean Warbler singing and foraging in my back yard. During my days as a nest searcher for Dr. Scott Robinson (Univ. Florida) in Illinois, I found several nests of this Robb T. Brumfeld Director, Roy Paul Daniels exquisite species high up in the forest canopy. It’s one of Professor and Curator of my favorite birds. Genetic Resources We have had an abundance of good news around the Frederick H. Sheldon Museum of late. Two of our doctoral students (Cathy George H. Newman from the Austin lab and Glenn Seeholzer from my lab) landed prestigious Lowery, Jr., Professor and Curator of Genetic Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grants from the National Science Foundation. Resources In addition, doctoral student Eric Rittmeyer (Austin) received an NSF postdoctoral fellowship to work on herps in Australia. Congrats to all! Christopher C. Austin Curator of We were also very pleased to learn that LSU alum Dr. Jason Weckstein (PhD 2003, Herpetology Sheldon lab) has accepted a position as Curator of Birds and Assistant Professor of Biology at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. The Academy Prosanta Chakrabarty Curator of Fishes of Natural Sciences is one of the oldest and most important collections in North America, but has been without a curator for several years now. Kudos to ANSP Jacob A. Esselstyn Curator of Collection Manager Dr. Nate Rice and the rest of their curators and faculty for Mammals making this happen. We look forward to watching Jason’s boundless energy put to work there and wish he and his family the best in their upcoming move. Naturally, J. V. Remsen John Staufer McIlhenny we claim a hand in Jason’s success for providing his graduate training, as we do all Professor and of our alums. :-) Curator of Birds Inside you’ll see an announcement Rebecca Saunders for our spring ornithology fundraiser, Curator of the Louisiana Birdathon. If you’ve Archaeology supported it in the past we hope you’ll Judith A. help it out again. If it has been a while Schiebout or you’ve never supported it, please Curator of Vertebrate consider helping it this year. All of Paleontology these funds go to supporting graduate student bird research at the Museum, Sophie Warny AASP Assistant Professor of including participation in expeditions, Palynology and Curator of DNA sequencing supplies, and travel Education to meetings. Even a small contribution can have a big impact on a graduate student’s career, and that feeds directly into the successes I mentioned above. Enjoy your Spring, Robb LSU Museum of Natural Science Page 1 Museum Quarterly, May 2014 Study On Evolution of Ovenbirds Featured in The Journal Nature A new study by Museum Director Robb molecular genetics and phylogenetics. Brumfield, former Museum postdoc Dr. Elizabeth Derryberry (now a professor at “We have a permanent genetic record of these Tulane University), and recent Museum graduate organisms, preserved in liquid nitrogen for future Dr. Santiago Claramunt (now a postdoc at researchers who could be working thousands of the American Museum of Natural History), in years from now,” Brumfield said. collaboration with Museum friends at Oxford University Dr. Joe Tobias and Dr. Nathalie Accompanying each tissue sample is a specimen Seddon (they led the study), determined that in the museum’s bird collection, which features species living together in close proximity are not more than 175,000 specimens. forced to evolve differently to avoid competing with each other, challenging a theory that has “Because we have both a tissue sample and the held since Darwin’s “Origin of Species.” specimen for each individual, we can begin to understand the connection between genotype and The study focused on ovenbirds, one of the most phenotype,” he explained. “A nice aspect of this diverse bird families in the world, to conduct study was that it integrated elegant analyses of the most in-depth analysis yet of the processes morphology using traditional museum specimens causing species differences to evolve. with cutting edge DNA analyses. And the results were surprising. It was long thought that different “To understand how and when these bird species species were able to persist in a diverse community evolved required reconstructing their tree of by evolving individual differences that reduced life. To do that, we extracted and sequenced competition, but our data showed that these DNA from tissue samples in the Museum’s differences evolved long before the community Collection of Genetic Resources, which is the was formed.” largest collection of its kind in the world at over 62,000 bird tissues,” said Robb Brumfield, The international research team, comprised Museum Director, Curator of Genetic Resources of scientists from Oxford, LSU, Tulane, Lund and Roy Paul Daniels Professor of Biology at University in Sweden and the American Museum LSU. “Studies such as this are only possible of Natural History in New York, found that although because of the 30+ years of field expeditions by bird species occurring together were consistently ornithologists lugging nitrogen tanks to far flung more different than species living apart, this was places of the world. This frozen tissue collection simply an artefact of species being old by the is quite literally an international treasure, buried time they meet. In fact, once variation in the age right here in the basement of Foster Hall.” of species was accounted for, coexisting species were actually more similar than species evolving With the growing importance of molecular and separately, opposite to Darwin’s view, which genomics studies (which rely heavily on DNA remains widely-held today. extracted from frozen tissues), the use of this collection has increased dramatically over the “It’s not so much a case of Darwin being wrong, last decade. The tissue samples are used for a as there is no shortage of evidence for competition wide variety of studies in forensics, epidemiology, driving divergent evolution in some very young conservation, wildlife management, comparative lineages,” said Joe Tobias of Oxford University’s LSU Museum of Natural Science Page 2 Museum Quarterly, May 2014useum Quar- The Red-billed Scythebill (Campylorhamphus trochilirostris), a woodcreeper from the ovenbird family. Photo by Joseph A. Tobias. Department of Zoology, who led the study. “But species living together would need to evolve we found no evidence that this process explains different songs to avoid confusion. differences across a much larger sample of species. By using genetic techniques to establish “’Looking at the bigger picture, ‘be different or die’ the age of lineages, we found that most ovenbird doesn’t appear to explain evolution,” said Tobias. species only meet their closest relatives several “Ovenbird species use a wide variety of beaks, million years after they separated from a common from long and hooked to short and straight, but ancestor. This gives them plenty of time to develop these differences appear to evolve when living in differences by evolving separately.” isolation, suggesting that competition is not the major driving force producing species differences. The study, published in Nature, compared the Instead, it seems to have the opposite effect in beaks, legs and songs of more than 90 percent promoting the evolution of similar songs.” of ovenbird species. Although species living together had beaks and legs that were no more Tobias explained that the reasons for this are different than those of species living apart, the difficult to explain and require further study, most surprising discovery was that they had but they may have something to do with the songs that were more similar. This challenges advantages of using the same “language” of some longstanding ideas because the standard similar aggressive or territorial signals. view for the last century has been that bird LSU Museum of Natural Science Page 3 Museum Quarterly, May 2014 Quarterly, No- “For instance, individuals of two closely related in age, and then comparing between lineages species with similar songs may benefit because of similar age, that the picture changes,” she they are able to defend territories and avoid said. “These insights are the result of a hugely harmful territorial contests not only against rivals collaborative venture, and a good example of of their own species but those in other species standing on the shoulders of giants. It took coexisting in the same places and competing for almost a decade to compile genetic sequences similar resources,” he said. and trait measurements from 350 lineages of ovenbird. The song recordings were made in over According to Nathalie Seddon of Oxford 20 countries by numerous tropical ornithologists, University, co-author of the study, the novelty of including ourselves, and the museum material this research comes from the fact that it accounts was based on specimens collected by hundreds for a species’ evolutionary age. of individuals stretching back to the famous British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace in the 1860s.” “A first glance at our data suggests the same patterns that Darwin had expected. It is only The research was funded by the Oxford University when accounting for the fact that species vary John Fell Fund, Queens College, Oxford, The LSU Museum of Natural Science Page 4 Museum Quarterly, May 2014 In Pursuit of Echiothrix Jake Esselstyn There is no other… island so closely surrounded by Four years ago, I began a project to inventory small other islands on every side, yet preserving such a terrestrial mammals on Sulawesi. My interests, marked individuality in its forms of life… and those of my collaborators (Anang Achmadi from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences and That’s how Alfred Wallace, the father of biogeography Kevin Rowe from Museum Victoria), were based in and co-discoverer of natural selection described regional biogeography.