[...] Potvin’s team dissected and examined the bodies of nearly 500 birds belonging to five common Australian species: the Australian magpie, laughing kookaburra, crested pigeon, rainbow lorikeet, and the scaly breasted lorikeet. All the animals had died after being admitted to wildlife hospitals in Queensland because of unrelated illness or injury. In addition to identifying the birds’ reproductive organs, researchers also tested their DNA to reveal their genetic sex.
The team was surprised to find sex-reversed individuals in all five species, at rates of 3% to 6%. Nearly all these discordant birds were genetically female but had male reproductive organs. However, the researchers also found a few genetic males with ovaries—including a genetically male kookaburra with a distended oviduct, indicating it had recently laid an egg.
We already knew dinosaurs did this so it makes sense birds do too! /s But really it's cool when we understand more about the world even if what we understand is just that we don't actually...
We already knew dinosaurs did this so it makes sense birds do too!
/s
But really it's cool when we understand more about the world even if what we understand is just that we don't actually understand it.
Oh that's a pretty fun question. As I understand it, the mechanisms for birdsong acquisition aren't entirely understood (at least across species of songbirds). It could be really interesting to...
Potvin’s work primarily focuses on birdsong, so she wonders how sex reversal might impact vocalization—especially in species where only the males can carry a tune
Oh that's a pretty fun question. As I understand it, the mechanisms for birdsong acquisition aren't entirely understood (at least across species of songbirds). It could be really interesting to investigate how sex reversal (kind of a funny term) affects song acquisition — is it tied to the genetic expression, the gonadic morphology, or something else??
Not sure at all about how sex reversal plays a role, but birds definitely have dialects (some species more than others), so while there may be a genetic component, a huge part for many is...
Not sure at all about how sex reversal plays a role, but birds definitely have dialects (some species more than others), so while there may be a genetic component, a huge part for many is environmental and where you recruit. If you ever hear White-throated Sparrows migrating in the spring, you can hear the young males practicing and the sound is not good!
When I was in college (like a decade ago, so I'm sure we know more now), one of the open questions was "How do singing birds improve their song?" The songs are super precise, but as you say,...
When I was in college (like a decade ago, so I'm sure we know more now), one of the open questions was "How do singing birds improve their song?" The songs are super precise, but as you say, they're certainly not known from birth. One of the interesting things that had been studied was that male songbirds (it was a specific species but I forget which) could improve their song to the point of wooing a mate even if they'd never heard the "correct" song before — as long as they were around female songbirds of the same species. The females were giving feedback cues in the form of wing twitches!
This of course just flips the question: how are the females developing their song preferences??
I think the precision and mechanicalness of birdsong is one of the things that unnerves me about birds. Also the jerky way they move when at rest. This is a total side tangent but my brain reads...
I think the precision and mechanicalness of birdsong is one of the things that unnerves me about birds. Also the jerky way they move when at rest. This is a total side tangent but my brain reads them as more robotic than biological and I have a visceral creeped-out response to that. It’s more of a reflexive feeling than a rational thought process, kind of an uncanny valley effect. I might tell someone I don’t “like birds” for that reason, even though I admire birders and appreciate the importance of birds in the ecosystem.
Benn Jordan recently encoded a PNG image into an audio spectrogram and taught a bird to repeat it… absolute insanity. The fact that any living creature has that capability blows my mind.
Ha! That's fair I suppose. Maybe you're already familiar with this, but does it help at all to know that songbird auditory cortices seem to categorize sound differently than humans'? Specifically,...
Ha! That's fair I suppose. Maybe you're already familiar with this, but does it help at all to know that songbird auditory cortices seem to categorize sound differently than humans'? Specifically, they seem to recognize spectral envelopes, rather than pitch or melodic contour. There are plenty of mundane, human auditory tasks (e.g. recognizing"Happy Birthday" in any key) that songbirds can't accomplish at all!
As for movement, I think maybe it's all the feathers that make their movements feel so alien. They appear much larger and more massive than they really are, but birds are largely teeny tiny critters that weigh practically nothing, so it's very easy for them to move very quickly. Like, it probably seems less alarming to see a field mouse twitch its head back and forth, because it seems more proportional?
It's still mindblowing to see, like, a grackle perfectly replicate the sound of a crosswalk alert, though.
This is a bit of a step away from birds, but I do find it really interesting to consider sex in nature. It's facts like this that really makes me not understand gender essentialists. Don't get me...
This is a bit of a step away from birds, but I do find it really interesting to consider sex in nature. It's facts like this that really makes me not understand gender essentialists. Don't get me wrong, I know we're not even in the same Class so it really isn't comparable, but it's absolutely remarkable to me that humans have such a strict and binary understanding of gender.
Even if you ignore the very existence of intersex people (something that 'gender criticals' are very good at), theres so much evidence to suggest that even in humans, sex isn't this solid binary thing.
Looking at the animal kingdom, we have so much evidence to suggest that sex is often a suggestion and not a rule. From hermaphroditic slugs (the true non-binary icons) to genderbending fish, and now transgender birds, nature is alive with animals that haven't quite figured out their sex: why shouldn't we be the same?
Granted, this phenomena seems to be far less common in mammals, but we still have intersex whales, bixexual monkeys, and homosexual lions! Sometimes it seems like the more we know about the world, the less we know. TERFs will argue all day long that sex is permanent, immutable, and binary. Everything we see in nature, and our own scientific research within humans, suggests this isn't the case. And that's not even getting into gender: something that for now, we assume only humans have, though I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't true. Plenty of animals seem to have their own sex/gender roles and rules.
Again, I know this is a bit off topic and I really didn't mean to go into an anti-TERF tirade, but I really do just think it's fascinating to see how complex and surprising the world can be sometimes.
Edit: I should say, before somebody comes for me about the genderbending fish and transgender birds: I know. Please, just afford me this tiny bit of joy!
I was also thinking about this. Truly our sexual dimorphism is not nearly as great as many of these species that can change sexes. Also parthenogenesis is pretty cool too!
I was also thinking about this.
Truly our sexual dimorphism is not nearly as great as many of these species that can change sexes. Also parthenogenesis is pretty cool too!
Compared to animals, the difference that jumps out to me is that we as humans are maybe a little too smart for our own good. We like things to be concrete and without surprise, particularly when...
Compared to animals, the difference that jumps out to me is that we as humans are maybe a little too smart for our own good. We like things to be concrete and without surprise, particularly when it comes to interacting with each other, and we’re among the only species intelligent enough to try to classify away nature’s ambiguities in effort to produce a simpler, more certain world. We’re also the only ones smart enough to engineer, enforce, and willingly participate in hierarchies that wouldn’t naturally arise otherwise, something that we widely do for the sake of power, control, and/or sense of belonging. We’re also the only ones smart enough to construct fragile, spiraling crystal castles for worldviews which the must be guarded with the utmost fervor to keep them from crashing down lest they come in contact with reality.
None of this justifies TERFy behavior of course, but this is what I see as the roots of it.
I'd be wary of stretching this research too far. Animals do have a concept of gender, in that they have certain roles, behaviors and cultural norms, and in many species, that gender does very...
I'd be wary of stretching this research too far. Animals do have a concept of gender, in that they have certain roles, behaviors and cultural norms, and in many species, that gender does very strictly adhere to sex, so if you're male, you're spending a lot of time competing for mates and hunting and if you're female, you're spending a lot of time nuturing young.
I'd be careful of making a statement like "look, these animals don't have strict gender and can transition, therefore why can't humans" because there are a lot of species that do have strict gender and don't.
All that this proves is that some species can change aspects of their sexual characteristics, but we've known that for hundreds of years. If a gender critical person didn't change their mind that sex is an immutable characteristics in all species based on that, they're not going to change their minds after finding out that birds do it too.
Don't worry, I'm not! This really was more of a light-hearted expression of joy over how wild and unique nature is. As a non-binary person, sex and gender are a topic I'm particularly interested...
Don't worry, I'm not! This really was more of a light-hearted expression of joy over how wild and unique nature is. As a non-binary person, sex and gender are a topic I'm particularly interested in, and as somebody with no real understanding of why I'm non binary, I find do find it interesting to look to the mystery of nature. I don't think anyone should be using this research to make any real decisions about sex and gender in human culture, something that (to other people, apparently) is invariably important.
I suppose my main point is that I can't quite fathom how, in a world so full of exceptions and variety, TERFs can only imagine one without any.
As someone who got very into backyard chicken keeping over the pandemic, I knew this occurred in chickens (hens developing rooster characteristics like spurs/sickle feathers/crowing, and no longer...
As someone who got very into backyard chicken keeping over the pandemic, I knew this occurred in chickens (hens developing rooster characteristics like spurs/sickle feathers/crowing, and no longer laying eggs), but had no idea it extended into such a variety of bird species! I had previously assumed the change was potentially triggered due to flock dynamics (missing a roo, being the top hen) but I guess not. I love learning something new each day :)
We learned about quite a few types of animals do this in my Bio 102 class this past summer semester. Also some lizards that are all female but take turns performing as the male role in...
We learned about quite a few types of animals do this in my Bio 102 class this past summer semester. Also some lizards that are all female but take turns performing as the male role in reproduction to stimulate ovulation, allowing reproduction via parthenogenesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexico_whiptail
It's pretty neat! And shows that sex and gender are not as binary as certain people are trying to force everyone to believe.
From the article:
We already knew dinosaurs did this so it makes sense birds do too!
/s
But really it's cool when we understand more about the world even if what we understand is just that we don't actually understand it.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize this was a Jurassic Park reference lol
(Thank you for letting me know! :D)
Happy to be a cause of confusion and later hopefully some amusement after. @sparksbet
Oh that's a pretty fun question. As I understand it, the mechanisms for birdsong acquisition aren't entirely understood (at least across species of songbirds). It could be really interesting to investigate how sex reversal (kind of a funny term) affects song acquisition — is it tied to the genetic expression, the gonadic morphology, or something else??
Not sure at all about how sex reversal plays a role, but birds definitely have dialects (some species more than others), so while there may be a genetic component, a huge part for many is environmental and where you recruit. If you ever hear White-throated Sparrows migrating in the spring, you can hear the young males practicing and the sound is not good!
When I was in college (like a decade ago, so I'm sure we know more now), one of the open questions was "How do singing birds improve their song?" The songs are super precise, but as you say, they're certainly not known from birth. One of the interesting things that had been studied was that male songbirds (it was a specific species but I forget which) could improve their song to the point of wooing a mate even if they'd never heard the "correct" song before — as long as they were around female songbirds of the same species. The females were giving feedback cues in the form of wing twitches!
This of course just flips the question: how are the females developing their song preferences??
I think the precision and mechanicalness of birdsong is one of the things that unnerves me about birds. Also the jerky way they move when at rest. This is a total side tangent but my brain reads them as more robotic than biological and I have a visceral creeped-out response to that. It’s more of a reflexive feeling than a rational thought process, kind of an uncanny valley effect. I might tell someone I don’t “like birds” for that reason, even though I admire birders and appreciate the importance of birds in the ecosystem.
Benn Jordan recently encoded a PNG image into an audio spectrogram and taught a bird to repeat it… absolute insanity. The fact that any living creature has that capability blows my mind.
Ha! That's fair I suppose. Maybe you're already familiar with this, but does it help at all to know that songbird auditory cortices seem to categorize sound differently than humans'? Specifically, they seem to recognize spectral envelopes, rather than pitch or melodic contour. There are plenty of mundane, human auditory tasks (e.g. recognizing"Happy Birthday" in any key) that songbirds can't accomplish at all!
As for movement, I think maybe it's all the feathers that make their movements feel so alien. They appear much larger and more massive than they really are, but birds are largely teeny tiny critters that weigh practically nothing, so it's very easy for them to move very quickly. Like, it probably seems less alarming to see a field mouse twitch its head back and forth, because it seems more proportional?
It's still mindblowing to see, like, a grackle perfectly replicate the sound of a crosswalk alert, though.
This is a bit of a step away from birds, but I do find it really interesting to consider sex in nature. It's facts like this that really makes me not understand gender essentialists. Don't get me wrong, I know we're not even in the same Class so it really isn't comparable, but it's absolutely remarkable to me that humans have such a strict and binary understanding of gender.
Even if you ignore the very existence of intersex people (something that 'gender criticals' are very good at), theres so much evidence to suggest that even in humans, sex isn't this solid binary thing.
Looking at the animal kingdom, we have so much evidence to suggest that sex is often a suggestion and not a rule. From hermaphroditic slugs (the true non-binary icons) to genderbending fish, and now transgender birds, nature is alive with animals that haven't quite figured out their sex: why shouldn't we be the same?
Granted, this phenomena seems to be far less common in mammals, but we still have intersex whales, bixexual monkeys, and homosexual lions! Sometimes it seems like the more we know about the world, the less we know. TERFs will argue all day long that sex is permanent, immutable, and binary. Everything we see in nature, and our own scientific research within humans, suggests this isn't the case. And that's not even getting into gender: something that for now, we assume only humans have, though I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't true. Plenty of animals seem to have their own sex/gender roles and rules.
Again, I know this is a bit off topic and I really didn't mean to go into an anti-TERF tirade, but I really do just think it's fascinating to see how complex and surprising the world can be sometimes.
Edit: I should say, before somebody comes for me about the genderbending fish and transgender birds: I know. Please, just afford me this tiny bit of joy!
I was also thinking about this.
Truly our sexual dimorphism is not nearly as great as many of these species that can change sexes. Also parthenogenesis is pretty cool too!
Compared to animals, the difference that jumps out to me is that we as humans are maybe a little too smart for our own good. We like things to be concrete and without surprise, particularly when it comes to interacting with each other, and we’re among the only species intelligent enough to try to classify away nature’s ambiguities in effort to produce a simpler, more certain world. We’re also the only ones smart enough to engineer, enforce, and willingly participate in hierarchies that wouldn’t naturally arise otherwise, something that we widely do for the sake of power, control, and/or sense of belonging. We’re also the only ones smart enough to construct fragile, spiraling crystal castles for worldviews which the must be guarded with the utmost fervor to keep them from crashing down lest they come in contact with reality.
None of this justifies TERFy behavior of course, but this is what I see as the roots of it.
I'd be wary of stretching this research too far. Animals do have a concept of gender, in that they have certain roles, behaviors and cultural norms, and in many species, that gender does very strictly adhere to sex, so if you're male, you're spending a lot of time competing for mates and hunting and if you're female, you're spending a lot of time nuturing young.
I'd be careful of making a statement like "look, these animals don't have strict gender and can transition, therefore why can't humans" because there are a lot of species that do have strict gender and don't.
All that this proves is that some species can change aspects of their sexual characteristics, but we've known that for hundreds of years. If a gender critical person didn't change their mind that sex is an immutable characteristics in all species based on that, they're not going to change their minds after finding out that birds do it too.
Don't worry, I'm not! This really was more of a light-hearted expression of joy over how wild and unique nature is. As a non-binary person, sex and gender are a topic I'm particularly interested in, and as somebody with no real understanding of why I'm non binary, I find do find it interesting to look to the mystery of nature. I don't think anyone should be using this research to make any real decisions about sex and gender in human culture, something that (to other people, apparently) is invariably important.
I suppose my main point is that I can't quite fathom how, in a world so full of exceptions and variety, TERFs can only imagine one without any.
As someone who got very into backyard chicken keeping over the pandemic, I knew this occurred in chickens (hens developing rooster characteristics like spurs/sickle feathers/crowing, and no longer laying eggs), but had no idea it extended into such a variety of bird species! I had previously assumed the change was potentially triggered due to flock dynamics (missing a roo, being the top hen) but I guess not. I love learning something new each day :)
We learned about quite a few types of animals do this in my Bio 102 class this past summer semester. Also some lizards that are all female but take turns performing as the male role in reproduction to stimulate ovulation, allowing reproduction via parthenogenesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexico_whiptail
It's pretty neat! And shows that sex and gender are not as binary as certain people are trying to force everyone to believe.