Evolution 6

FIGURE 9

Evidence that natural selection alters beak size in Geospiza fortis. In dry years, when only large, tough seeds are available, the mean beak size increases. In wet years, when many small seeds are available, smaller beaks become more common.


Many biologists visited the Galápagos after Darwin, but it was 100 years before any tried this key test of his hypothesis. When the great naturalist David Lack finally set out to do this in 1938, observing the birds closely for a full 5 months, his observations seemed to contradict Darwin’s proposal! Lack often observed many different species of finch feeding together on the same seeds. His data indicated that the stout-beaked species and the slender-beaked species were feeding on the very same array of seeds.

We now know that it was Lack’s misfortune to study the birds during a wet year, when food was plentiful. The finch’s beak is of little importance in such flush times; small seeds are so abundant that birds of all species are able to get enough to eat. Later work has revealed a very different picture during leaner, dry years, when few seeds are available and the difference between survival and starvation depends on being able to efficiently gather enough to eat. In such times, having beaks designed to be maximally effective for a particular type of food becomes critical and the species diverge in their diet, each focusing on the type of food to which it is specialized.

A Closer Look

The key to successfully testing Darwin’s proposal that the beaks of Galápagos finches are adaptations to different food sources proved to be patience. Starting in 1973, Peter and Rosemary Grant of Princeton University and generations of their students have studied the medium ground finch Geospiza fortis on a tiny island in the center of the Galápagos called Daphne Major. These finches feed preferentially on small tender seeds, produced in abundance by plants in wet years. The birds resort to larger, drier seeds, which are harder to crush, only when small seeds become depleted during long periods of dry weather, when plants produce few seeds.

The Grants quantified beak shape among the medium ground finches of Daphne Major by carefully measuring beak depth (width of beak, from top to bottom, at its base) on individual birds. Measuring many birds every year, they were able to assemble for the first time a detailed portrait of evolution in action. The Grants found that beak depth changed from one year to the next in a predictable fashion. During droughts, plants produced few seeds and all available small seeds quickly were eaten, leaving large seeds as the major remaining source of food. As a result, birds with large beaks survived better, because they were better able to break open these large seeds. Consequently, the average beak depth of birds in the population increased the next year, only to decrease again when wet seasons returned (figure 9).

Could these changes in beak dimension reflect the action of natural selection? An alternative possibility might be that the changes in beak depth do not reflect changes in gene frequencies, but rather are simply a response to dietperhaps during lean times the birds become malnourished and then grow stouter beaks, for example. To rule out this possibility, the Grants measured the relation of parent bill size to offspring bill size, examining many broods over several years. The depth of the bill was passed down faithfully from one generation to the next, regardless of environmental conditions, suggesting that the differences in bill size indeed reflected genetic differences.

Darwin Was Right after All

If the year-to-year changes in beak depth indeed reflect genetic changes, as now seems likely, and these changes can be predicted by the pattern of dry years, then Darwin was right after allnatural selection does seem to be operating to adjust the beak to its food supply. Birds with stout beaks have an advantage during dry periods, for they can break the large, dry seeds that are the only food available. When small seeds become plentiful once again with the return of wet weather, a smaller beak proves a more efficient tool for harvesting the more abundant smaller seeds.

Among Darwin’s finches, natural selection adjusts the shape of the beak in response to the nature of the available food supply, adjustments that can be seen to be occurring even today.

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