Hummingbird plumage color diversity exceeds the known gamut of all other birds

Venable, Gabriela X; Gahm, Kaija; Prum, Richard O.

doi:10.1038/s42003-022-03518-2

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…Illustration design by Julieta Ornelas Peresbarbosa and Juan Francisco Ornelas. Rombaut et al, 2022;Sandlin, 2000;Tello-Ramos et al, 2014;Temeles et al, 2005;Venable et al, 2022). The association between sexual dimorphism in bill curvature and niche breadth and the behavioural and environmental factors potentially affecting this association identified here, might be an indication that more than one mechanism is operating simultaneously, and that we need to invoke multiple explanations in further research for disentangling the selective forces for variation in size and plumage dimorphism and foraging ecology among hummingbirds.…”

Section: F I G U R Ementioning

confidence: 80%

“…Despite the great progress in understanding resource partitioning by sex to reduce intersexual competition in hummingbirds, as shown by Maglianesi and collaborators, there is still much needed information on the foraging ecology of female hummingbirds, a gender gap in the science of hummingbirds in which females have been generally under‐studied (e.g. González‐Gómez et al, 2014; Rombaut et al, 2022; Sandlin, 2000; Tello‐Ramos et al, 2014; Temeles et al, 2005; Venable et al, 2022). The association between sexual dimorphism in bill curvature and niche breadth and the behavioural and environmental factors potentially affecting this association identified here, might be an indication that more than one mechanism is operating simultaneously, and that we need to invoke multiple explanations in further research for disentangling the selective forces for variation in size and plumage dimorphism and foraging ecology among hummingbirds.…”

Section: Figurementioning

confidence: 99%

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Sex‐specific flower resource use in hummingbird communities

Ornelas

2022

Journal of Animal Ecology

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Research Highlight: Maglianesi, M. A., Maruyama, P. K., Temeles, E. J., Schleuning, M., Zanata, T. B., Sazima, M., Gutiérrez‐Zamora, A., Marín‐Gómez, O. H., Rosero‐Lasprilla, L., Ramírez‐Burbano, M. B., Ruffini, A. E., Salamanca‐Reyes, J. R., Sazima, I., Nuñez‐Rosas, L. E., Arizmendi, M. C., Rahbek, C., & Dalsgaard, B. (2022). Behavioural and morphological traits influence sex‐specific floral resource use by hummingbirds across the Americas. Journal of Animal Ecology, 00: 00–00. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.13746. In their paper on intersexual differences in niche breadth and niche overlap in floral resource use in hummingbird communities, Maglianesi et al. compiled data of plant–hummingbird interactions based on pollen loads, and territoriality and morphological traits for 31 hummingbird species, and investigated whether patterns of resource use by females and males were related to sexual dimorphism and foraging behaviour. While accounting for evolutionary relatedness among species, the authors found a high level of resource partitioning between sexes (broader and more dissimilar floral niche breadth in females) and the sex‐specific resource use by hummingbird species was related to territoriality and morphological traits; niche overlap between sexes was greater for territorial than non‐territorial species, and lower for species with greater sexual dimorphism in bill curvature. This paper addresses two very timely issues, on the one hand on resource partitioning by sex to reduce intersexual competition in hummingbirds, and on the other hand highlight the much needed information on foraging ecology of female hummingbirds for better understanding of intersexual variation in shaping coexistence and species diversity in hummingbird communities and the interactions between plants and their hummingbird pollinators.

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Section: F I G U R Ementioning

confidence: 80%

Section: Figurementioning

confidence: 99%

Sex‐specific flower resource use in hummingbird communities

Ornelas

2022

Journal of Animal Ecology

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“…Hummingbirds frequently have color patches that are particularly important for one‐on‐one interaction and the largest patch gamuts (i.e., achieved color diversity) are on the gorget and the crown (Venable et al., 2022). Given the lack of behaviors involving crown displays in our focal species, we limited our data collection to gorget coloration.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We measured reflectance spectra from gorget patches of specimens housed at the Yale Peabody Museum and the American Museum of Natural History using a S2000 Ocean Optics spectrometer and a bifurcated fiber with an Ocean Optics DH‐2000‐BAL deuterium–halogen light source (Ocean Optics) in a dark room with an integration time of 100 ms according to the methods used in Venable et al. (2022). In cases where we had more than one representative of the species, we chose specimens according to which ones were in the best condition relative to the other individuals in the collection.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phenotype predicts interspecific dominance hierarchies in a cloud‐forest hummingbird guild

Fernandez‐Duque,

Miller,

Fernandez‐Duque

et al. 2023

Ethology

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Competition over resources often leads to intra‐ and interspecific interactions, which can be detrimental to the individuals involved. Thus, natural selection should favor communication systems that reliably convey information regarding the relative competitive abilities of an individual, reducing the need for physically damaging confrontation. Body size, sex, age, relatedness, and ornamentation are important factors determining dominance across diverse taxa in intraspecific interactions. These traits, when perceptible, may serve as signals across species in guilds that have frequent interspecific interactions. Hummingbirds provide a tractable system to study such community dynamics due to their high frequency of interactions, variable ornamentation, diverse body sizes, fast metabolism, and large overlap in resource utilization. Even in this system, potential interactions between morphology and coloration are rarely accounted for together when analyzing dominance between species. We take a novel approach to understanding interspecific dominance by assessing behavior, morphology, and coloration across different types of behavioral interactions. Across 11 tropical montane hummingbird species, we find that dominance is predicted by wing size and some metrics of plumage coloration. However, the biological significance of these factors varies between the different dominance behaviors performed. These results inform our understanding of interspecific signaling and its role in the evolution of intraguild communication and resource competition.

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“…In this family, several morphological and locomotion-related traits have been extensively studied, showing that wing, bill and tail traits are involved in intra-and inter-sexual interactions [14,[41][42][43], but are also under natural selection for access to resources through interference and exploitative competition [8,9,14,44]. Hummingbird coloration is highly diverse and has been associated with both sexual selection for mate attraction [45][46][47], selection for social dominance [27,48,49] and camouflage [45,46]; similarly, hummingbirds also display a wide range of diversity in song structure [50,51].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The evolution of sexually dimorphic traits in ecological gradients: an interplay between natural and sexual selection in hummingbirds

et al. 2022

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Traits that exhibit differences between the sexes have been of special interest in the study of phenotypic evolution. Classic hypotheses explain sexually dimorphic traits via intra-sexual competition and mate selection, yet natural selection may also act differentially on the sexes to produce dimorphism. Natural selection can act either through physiological and ecological constraints on one of the sexes, or by modulating the strength of sexual/social selection. This predicts an association between the degree of dimorphism and variation in ecological environments. Here, we characterize the variation in hummingbird dimorphism across ecological gradients using rich databases of morphology, colouration and song. We show that morphological dimorphism decreases with elevation in the understorey and increases with elevation in mixed habitats, that dichromatism increases at high altitudes in open and mixed habitats, and that song is less complex in mixed habitats. Our results are consistent with flight constraints, lower predation pressure at high elevations and with habitat effects on song transmission. We also show that dichromatism and song complexity are positively associated, while tail dimorphism and song complexity are negatively associated. Our results suggest that key ecological factors shape sexually dimorphic traits, and that different communication modalities do not always evolve in tandem.

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Hummingbird plumage color diversity exceeds the known gamut of all other birds

Cited by 7 publications

References 47 publications

Sex‐specific flower resource use in hummingbird communities

Sex‐specific flower resource use in hummingbird communities

Phenotype predicts interspecific dominance hierarchies in a cloud‐forest hummingbird guild

The evolution of sexually dimorphic traits in ecological gradients: an interplay between natural and sexual selection in hummingbirds

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