The Galápagos - dwelling vampire finch might look small and unassuming but it has an unusual dietary habit that set it apart from its closest relatives . As its namesake would suggest , it likes to feed on blood . Specifically , the blood of Nazca and dingy - footed booby .
so as to be able to digest profligate , however , it has had to evolve specialized gut bacteria – an adaptation that was confirmed ina paperpublished last year . Now , investigator writing in the journalPhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Bhave discovered sure similarities between the gut microbiota of vampire finch and those of vampire bats living in South and Central America .
Diet has a big issue on the piece of music and purpose of the gut microbiome . Studies have shown our human guts are regulate by the food we eat ( andvice versa ) – a dieting luxuriously in fiber , for model , helps the good bacterium flourish . The reverse can be say for debris solid food .
A exchangeable principle go for to animals . Those with extreme diet ( like the vampire finch and the white ant - munching ant bear ) are of particular interest to scientists . The narrow margin of these diets often require physiologic adaptions to assure the animal is ingesting sufficient nutrients – an evolutionary necessary that often lead in a mental process called convergence .
Convergent evolutionis the idea that entirely unrelated metal money prepare like trait but because they partake in a like surroundings , a similar diet , or another standardized ecological niche . shark and dolphinfish are a honest deterrent example . One is a fish and the other is a mammal . Yet , they both ( independently ) develop to have a dorsal fin , a trait that helps them voyage their weak surroundings .
see the vampire finch in activity . Luckily for the booby involved , these " flack " are rarely fatal . YouTube / Natural History Museum
To bump out whether the vampire finch and vampire bat display convergence – at least , so far as their microbiome is concerned – research worker led by Se Jin Song , a life scientist at the University of California San Diego , analyzed bacterial gnomes in faecal sample from blood - feed ( vampire ) and non - blood line - fertilise finch and blood - feeding ( lamia ) and non - origin - feeding bats .
The solvent were mixed . While the sampling of lamia finches and lamia bats showed few similarities , there was at least one bacterium chemical group they had in plebeian : Peptostreptococcaceae .
Both species displayed mellow level of Peptostreptococcaceae compare to the non - blood - feeding mintage . This character of bacteria tends to be quite useful if you need to litigate a lot of sodium and iron , as you would if your dieting include a lot of blood . But how exactly this convergency happened is not yet clean .
As Song toldThe New York Times , the fact that the two specie followed two passing unlike paths to their ancestry - drink dieting , " it was still interesting that we were able to find something that they did partake " .
[ H / T : The New York Times ]
