Using genetic research, Dr. Andy Jones and his colleagues were able to discover the family roots of a mystery bird. Margaret asks about the find and about Dr. Jones' career as an ornithologist.
This Spot on Science was produced with generous support from our partner station WETA and Ken Burns’ The Gene: An Intimate History. For more information and resources on genetics, please visit PBS LearningMedia which offers a wide range of instructional materials highlighting Ken Burns’ The Gene: An Intimate History.
Class Discussion Questions:
1) What traits do you have that you can observe in your parents?
2) What evidence was there that the "odd" cerulian warblers was different from other warblers?
3) What can scientists learn from hybradized animals, like birds?
4) Take notes on the animals you observe over the course of a weekend. What did you see? What were the animals doing? Compare you notes with a friend.
Read the Script:
[Margaret] So don't laugh, but this is a baby picture of me. Pretty cute, right? And, not surprising, I look a bit like my mom and dad. That's because our genes are passed to us from our parents.
And guess what? It's the same for every other animal, including birds. But birds never take family photos like we do, so it's up to scientists to figure out their family relationships. And, would you believe it?
I happened to know a scientist who studies that very topic. No, not bird family photos. Dr.Andy Jones is a curator of ornithology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. He studies bird genetics. So I called him on up and started asking him about his career. Take a look.
[Andy] My job at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History is a curator of Ornithology. So that means I curate a collection of bird specimens and this is really work that's behind the scenes.
When you come visit the natural history museum, you see birds that are on exhibit and that's not actually what I do. Behind the scenes, we have another 35,000 bird specimens and my job is to take care of that collection. Make sure it's in good condition. Make sure it's accessible to other researchers. And it's also for my own research.
So I do work with the museum specimens, I do work with DNA samples that come from them and try and answer all sorts of questions in ornithology.
[Margaret] So when it comes to DNA and genetics, can you talk a little bit about your work with that?
[Andy] Yeah, so it's important that you know DNA is inherited. So it tells us about these sorts of relationships from parents to offspring.
And a graduate student that I'm working with was doing field work in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. He was tasked with doing a survey of Cerulean Warblers and while he was out there, he got to know that species really well. And then he heard one that sounded kind of weird.
And so he took a look at that bird, and from below you would see a white bird, white on the belly with kind of a blue bar across the chest. And he looked up and he saw a bird that had a very thin blue bar across the chest, but then yellow on the belly. So he knew something was odd, but it still sounded kind of like a Cerulean.
Well, because he's a researcher, he also had permits to catch birds so he could take a feather sample and a blood sample and take photos of this odd bird. So he sent the samples to me and I worked with one of my colleagues in the museum in the lab, and we confirmed this was a hybrid between a Cerulean Warbler and a Northern Parula, which is another kind of warbler.
[Margaret] Wow, and so it seems like really cool work to be able to look at these different characteristics through DNA and to find hybrid birds. But what is so important about locating these hybrid birds?
[Andy] I mean there's just very basic natural history interests when we find hybrids. It's just interesting, and it kind of challenges the way we think about what a species is in the first place. So there's that kind of basic level of interest here, but also there's a conservation aspect of this.
So Northern Parula's are doing pretty well. They're actually expanding their range, coming from Southern Ohio and moving North. And then Cerulean Warbler is, I would say it's still fairly common, but their numbers are going down every single year. We have fewer and fewer.
So we're worried about the species already. But if you add a further complication of them hybridizing with the different species. If that becomes more and more frequent, then we're actually losing the genes of Cerulean Warbler, and we might actually see that species start losing out against Northern Parula.
So we're not saying that's definitely happening, but we are sort of sounding a small alarm saying they do hybridize, it's time to pay very careful attention to make sure this is not a more widespread issue.
[Margaret] Right, take a look at it now before it becomes a question of extinction.
[Andy] Yeah.
[Margaret] And I wonder what got you interested in birds?
[Andy] So I was a natural history nerd as a kid. I really got interested in seeing what was in my yard and then the creek around my house. I have field notes from when I was age five. I was counting the number of toads in my front yard.
I was encouraged by my dad to write things down. He knew it was important if you're thinking about science at all to write down notes. You know it's decades later and I still do that every day actually. And so I got sort of bitten by this nature bug early, and then I was encouraged by a lot of people to stick with it.
[Margaret] Wow, so it sounds like if you just follow your curiosity with science, you could end up with a really cool career.
[Andy] Yeah, I think if you have a passion for something, even if it's not the most common thing, if all of your friends are not following the same thing, that's fine. There, it may not be clear exactly where your career is gonna go. But the fact that you're passionate about it is really important.
And you just need to find the people who help encourage that, and help you along your way towards whatever that might become. It might be a big hobby, it might be a career. You never know.
[Margaret] Definitely, well, thank you so much for sharing with us. It's been fun.
[Andy] Yeah, thanks for the conversation.