Hello, dear reader! So, a bunch of science dudes & dudettes working mostly in France & Spain sticks its nose in the "what else the climate change causes?" business, "identified colorful flying living objects" branch. And it finds something interesting (López-Idiáquez et al, 2022 (P)).
The researchers indeed, for fifteen years (2005-2019) stalk birds, specifically, two Mediterranean blue tit subspecies, more specifically, the Cyanistes caeruleus caeruleus and the Cyanistes caeruleus ogliastrae, which tipically have bright blue crowns and yellow breasts.
The scientists collect more than 5800 observations on these winged animals, and, thanks to these data, the brains can then say that the birds' colors are now "duller and less chromatic in both sexes" (P) than when the study began.
The researchers, besides, perform a genetic analysis on the animals to check if evolution be at work on their color traits, and eventually they verify that, well, it is not.
So, the people of the science conclude that the loss in brilliance of the birds' colors is "caused by a plastic response to the environmental conditions [and their work] suggests that ornamental colorations could become less conspicuous because of warming" (P).
In short, climate change strikes again! And it even influences the colors of birds, which are not (the colors) just there by chance, or to catch the eye of human photographers so to end up on some bird-fashion journal's glossy glamorous cover and get all lavishly birdy-rich&famous. Nope.
Colors are part of the "sexual and social ornaments" family (P), meaning they are important for the mating and breeding process of animals, since they are used as markers of the quality of the biological stuff specimens are made of.
So, dear reader, to sum up, climate change, among other tons of not particularly pleasant things, makes colorful birds less colorful.
As to the why this de-balzing thing happen, well,
this dumb blog has an idea that you can find in the following cartoon. Ciao!
Bird's coloration gets less conspicuous due to climate change (by @sciencemug) Top bird pic and bottom bird pic are CC0 Public Domain images (source: pxhere); mirror pic by Dalida's Art is under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License (source: deviantart); all pics adapted by @sciencemug |