By: Felicia Cafua, Maddie Fancher, Sydney Ledoux, and Deirdre Boyer (Stonehill College, BIO323: Evolution, Spring 2021)
One of the most exciting parts of life is the diversity of colors that animals exhibit. When looking at the diversity of an animal’s color, many questions arise: Why are there so many different colors? Wouldn’t this attract more predators? How do these different colors arise? Birds are a fantastic example of the diversity of coloration; even in one bird species, there can be considerable variation between individuals. Parrots, in particular, show a great diversity of coloration and can have very intense plumage coloration. Plumage color is the color of the feathers covering the entire bird collectively. The exact reasoning for such a wide range of plumage colors is not well understood. Here we summarize a recent paper on plumage coloration in parrots that was published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology.
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