Post by Eaglehawk on Aug 29, 2019 8:00:54 GMT
Golden-winged Warbler - Vermivora chrysoptera
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Passeriformes
Family: Parulidae
Genus: Vermivora
Species: Vermivora chrysoptera
The golden-winged warbler (Vermivora chrysoptera) is a New World warbler. It breeds in southeastern and south-central Canada and the Appalachian Mountains northeastern to north-central USA. The majority (~70%) of the global population breeds in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Manitoba. Golden-winged warbler populations are slowly expanding northwards, but are generally declining across its range, most likely as a result of habitat loss and competition/interbreeding with the very closely related blue-winged warbler, Vermivora cyanoptera.
Range of V. chrysoptera
Yellow = Breeding range
Blue = Wintering range
Description
This is a small warbler, measuring 11.6 cm (4.6 in) long and weighing 8–10 g (0.28–0.35 oz). The male has black throat (suggestive of the throat patch of a chickadee), black ear patch bordered in white, yellow crown and wing patch. Females feature a similar coloration pattern, but the black is replaced with light grey. In both sexes, extensive white on the tail is conspicuous from below. Underparts are grayish white and the bill is long and slender. Unlike most warblers, juveniles can be reliably sexed (using throat patch color) approximately 15 days after fledging. Pure breed golden-winged warblers are almost unmistakable if seen well.
Life history
Golden-winged warblers are migratory, breeding in eastern North America and wintering in southern Central America and the neighboring regions in Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. This is a very rare vagrant to western Europe, with a single record of a bird wintering in a supermarket car park in Maidstone, Kent in 1989 and another from Corvo, Azores, in October 2012.
Golden-winged warblers breed in open scrubby areas, wetlands, and occasionally mature forest adjacent to those habitats. They lay 3–6 eggs (often 5) in a highly concealed cup nest on the ground or low in a bush.
These birds feed on insects, and spiders, most often leaf-roller caterpillars. Golden-winged warblers have strong gaping (opening) musculature for their bill, allowing them to uncover hidden caterpillars.
The song is highly variable, but is most often heard as a trilled bzzzzzzz buzz buzz buzz. The call is a buzzy chip or zip.
This species forms two distinctive hybrids with blue-winged warbler where their ranges overlap in the Great Lakes and New England area. The commoner, genetically dominant Brewster's warbler is gray above and whitish (male) or yellow (female) below. It has a black eyestripe and two white wing bars.
The rarer recessive Lawrence's warbler has a male plumage which is green and yellow above and yellow below, with white wing bars and the same face pattern as male Golden-winged. The female is gray above and whitish below with two yellow wing bars and the same face pattern as female Golden-winged. Both Brewster's and Lawrence's warblers can vary considerably in their physical features and can potentially sing songs of either the blue-winged or the golden-winged warblers.
Genetic introgression occurs across their range, producing cryptic hybrids (morphologically pure individuals with small amounts of blue-winged warbler DNA). These hybrids may be present in low numbers even on the edges of golden-winged warbler range, far from any populations of blue-winged warblers.
Birds May Have Sensed Severe Storms Days in Advance
The sudden departure of golden-winged warblers before deadly tornadoes has blown away scientists.
A golden-winged warbler (Vermivora chrysoptera) sings on a tree branch in Michigan.
Carrie Arnold
for National Geographic
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 18, 2014
Earlier this year, a group of scientists studying golden-winged warblers in Tennessee noticed something odd: The birds had taken a sudden detour from their breeding grounds.
Analysis of the data revealed that the birds took off for Florida several days in advance of a large, severe thunderstorm system that was advancing across the Great Plains.
A new study suggests that these warblers detected the severe weather and got the heck out of the way—an ability never before documented in birds.
The scientists theorize the birds were tipped off by infrasound—a type of low-frequency noise—produced by the storms. Although humans can't hear infrasound, birds can, and the destructive nature of these storms may make it advantageous for the birds to get out of the way despite the high-energy costs of flight.
"We were completely blown away by this behavior. It shows that the birds can do more than we give them credit for," said study co-author Gunnar Kramer, a population ecologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Mysterious Flight
Kramer and his colleagues happened upon the discovery by accident, while studying migration patterns of golden-winged warblers.
The songbird spends winters in Central and South America and migrates to the Great Lakes region and the Appalachians to breed and raise young.
To learn more details about this behavior, the team traveled to the Great Lakes and fitted some of the warblers with a small, lightweight geolocator that recorded their exact locations every few minutes, according to the study, published December 18 in the journal Current Biology.
In April 2014, the researchers tracked the birds to the Cumberland Mountains of eastern Tennessee to check on them. But when they arrived, the mountains were silent. Their warblers weren't there.
"We thought the birds were just hunkering down. It never occurred to me that they might have evacuated," Kramer said.
When the team checked on the warblers' locations via their geolocators, they discovered the birds were in Florida. One bird had even traveled to Cuba.
Several days later, however, the birds flew back to Tennessee, having mysteriously traveled more than 900 miles (1,500 kilometers) round-trip.
A chance look at a weather report gave scientists their hint—right around the time the birds left Tennessee, a severe weather system clobbered the Midwest, spawning 84 tornadoes that killed at least 35 people.
However, the scientists emphasize in the study that it's unknown exactly why the birds veered from their migration route in April 2014, and that the storms' infrasound was a "probable cue" to escape.
To Jonathan Hagstrum, a geophysicist at the United States Geological Survey who studies bird migration, the new research supports the idea that birds use infrasound during migration.
"These results show another way that birds can use low-frequency sound," said Hagstrum, who wasn't involved in the new study.
"They're not just using it to navigate, but to identify and avoid severe weather. It all fits in," he said.
news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141218-birds-weather-tornadoes-science-animals-environment/
Tornadic Storm Avoidance Behavior in Breeding Songbirds
Henry M. Streby, Gunnar R. Kramer, Sean M. Peterson, Justin A. Lehman, David A. Buehler, David E. Andersen
DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.10.079
Highlights
•Migrant songbirds evacuated their territories to circumvent a severe tornado outbreak
•Obligate migrants can make facultative migrations outside of normal migration periods
•Infrasound from tornadic storms could be a long-distance cue for evacuation migration
Summary
Migration is a common behavior used by animals of many taxa to occupy different habitats during different periods. Migrant birds are categorized as either facultative (i.e., those that are forced to migrate by some proximal cue, often weather) or obligate (i.e., those that migrate on a regular cycle). During migration, obligate migrants can curtail or delay flights in response to inclement weather or until favorable winds prevail, and they can temporarily reorient or reverse direction when ecological or meteorological obstacles are encountered. However, it is not known whether obligate migrants undertake facultative migrations and make large-scale movements in response to proximal cues outside of their regular migration periods. Here, we present the first documentation of obligate long-distance migrant birds undertaking a facultative migration, wherein breeding golden-winged warblers (Vermivora chrysoptera) carrying light-level geolocators performed a >1,500 km 5-day circumvention of a severe tornadic storm. The birds evacuated their breeding territories >24 hr before the arrival of the storm and atmospheric variation associated with it. The probable cue, radiating >1,000 km from tornadic storms, perceived by birds and influencing bird behavior and movements, is infrasound (i.e., sound below the range of human hearing). With the predicted increase in severity and frequency of similar storms as anthropogenic climate change progresses, understanding large-scale behavioral responses of animals to such events will be an important objective of future research.
www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(14)01428-6
New insights into genetic basis of bird migration
by Gail Mccormick, Pennsylvania State University
A team of researchers has identified a gene associated with migration in golden-winged and blue-winged warblers using whole genome sequencing and migration tracking technology. The team compared genetic differences among birds that winter in Central America and those that winter in South America. Credit: Jacob Spendelow
A gene newly associated with the migratory patterns of golden-winged and blue-winged warblers could lend insight into the longstanding question of how birds migrate across such long distances.
A new study led by researchers at Penn State and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is the first to combine whole genome sequencing and migration tracking technology to pinpoint a single gene associated with the complex suite of traits that determine migratory behavior. These findings may have important conservation implications for the declining populations of golden-winged warblers. The paper appears online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and describes the gene, which is associated with a neurological disorder in humans.
"The great migrations of the world have been inspiring people for hundreds of years," said David Toews, assistant professor of biology at Penn State and leader of the research team. "The migration of birds is particularly fascinating because small species primarily navigate alone, at night, and at high altitudes, so people do not always see it happening. They are in your backyard, and then they are gone."
Migration programming in birds is incredibly complex, encompassing a suite of neurological, physiological, and behavioral traits. Researchers have known for a few decades that there is a genetic component to migration. Recent studies in birds have identified large regions of the genome, encompassing hundreds of genes, associated with migration, but it has been more difficult to pinpoint the specific roles of any single gene.
"In this study, we found only one gene associated with the final wintering destination of golden-winged and blue-winged warblers," said Toews.
The researchers studied migration patterns in golden-winged warblers and blue-winged warblers, genetically-similar species that breed in the Midwest and northeastern United States. Some birds of each species migrate to wintering grounds in Central America, from Panama to Guatemala, while others travel further to South America, primarily Venezuela. Birds will usually return to similar breeding grounds and wintering sites each year.
Members of the research team from the University of Toledo previously determined the specific locations where these birds were wintering. They placed geolocators, essentially small backpacks with light sensors, on birds caught at breeding grounds in the U.S. The geolocators recorded light levels of their environment, which the researchers analyzed when the birds were captured the next year at their breeding sites.
"These light levels allow you to calculate the approximate location of birds along their migration track and at their wintering grounds, based on sunrise and sunset times and a few other factors," said Henry Streby of the Toledo team. "This information is particularly important for conservation management of golden-winged warblers, whose numbers are rapidly declining in the Appalachian Mountains. Conservation efforts have focused on protecting the breeding grounds, which is important, but declines also appear strongly related to habitat alteration and destruction in the wintering grounds."
"The global attention on the fires in the Amazon highlights the importance of these South American habitats, and these migratory birds illustrate an inextricable link between hemispheres," said Toews.
Importantly, the team from Toledo took genetic samples from the migrating birds, which allowed the group to investigate genetic differences between birds that winter in Central America and those that winter in South America. The majority of these differences occurred in a small region on the bird's Z chromosome, a sex-determining chromosome like the X and Y chromosomes in humans. Only one gene, called VPS13A, was present in this region.
Although the gene does not yet have any known function in birds, in humans it is associated with the neurodegenerative disorder chorea-acanthocytosis, which affects movement.
"As we come to better understand the role of this gene in humans, we may also gain important insights to its role in migration in birds," said Toews. "This is very speculative at this point, but we think it could be involved in clearing reactive oxygen species, which are free radicals that can build up during a prolonged migration and damage cells. We would like to perform additional studies to know when and in what tissues this gene is expressed in these birds. But because golden-winged warblers are facing declines, we may first investigate whether this gene is associated with migration in any of the other 50 or so migratory species of warblers, which may provide a more tractable way to study the gene."
According to the researchers, the gene appears to be a target of natural selection in birds that winter in South America.
"And that's really cool, because we don't always see natural selection operating on contemporary timelines for something like migratory traits that have been around for a long time."
phys.org/news/2019-08-insights-genetic-basis-bird-migration.html
Journal Reference:
David P. L. Toews et al. Selection on VPS13A linked to migration in a songbird, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1909186116
Abstract
Animal migration demands an interconnected suite of adaptations for individuals to navigate over long distances. This trait complex is crucial for small birds whose migratory behaviors—such as directionality—are more likely innate, rather than being learned as in many longer-lived birds. Identifying causal genes has been a central goal of migration ecology, and this endeavor has been furthered by genome-scale comparisons. However, even the most successful studies of migration genetics have achieved low-resolution associations, identifying large chromosomal regions that encompass hundreds of genes, one or more of which might be causal. Here we leverage the genomic similarity among golden-winged (Vermivora chrysoptera) and blue-winged (V. cyanoptera) warblers to identify a single gene—vacuolar protein sorting 13A (VPS13A)—that is associated with distinct differences in migration to Central American (CA) or South American (SA) wintering areas. We find reduced sequence variation in this gene region for SA wintering birds, and show this is the likely result of natural selection on this locus. In humans, variants of VPS13A are linked to the neurodegenerative disorder chorea-acanthocytosis. This association provides one of the strongest gene-level associations with avian migration differences.
www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/08/23/1909186116
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Passeriformes
Family: Parulidae
Genus: Vermivora
Species: Vermivora chrysoptera
The golden-winged warbler (Vermivora chrysoptera) is a New World warbler. It breeds in southeastern and south-central Canada and the Appalachian Mountains northeastern to north-central USA. The majority (~70%) of the global population breeds in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Manitoba. Golden-winged warbler populations are slowly expanding northwards, but are generally declining across its range, most likely as a result of habitat loss and competition/interbreeding with the very closely related blue-winged warbler, Vermivora cyanoptera.
Range of V. chrysoptera
Yellow = Breeding range
Blue = Wintering range
Description
This is a small warbler, measuring 11.6 cm (4.6 in) long and weighing 8–10 g (0.28–0.35 oz). The male has black throat (suggestive of the throat patch of a chickadee), black ear patch bordered in white, yellow crown and wing patch. Females feature a similar coloration pattern, but the black is replaced with light grey. In both sexes, extensive white on the tail is conspicuous from below. Underparts are grayish white and the bill is long and slender. Unlike most warblers, juveniles can be reliably sexed (using throat patch color) approximately 15 days after fledging. Pure breed golden-winged warblers are almost unmistakable if seen well.
Life history
Golden-winged warblers are migratory, breeding in eastern North America and wintering in southern Central America and the neighboring regions in Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. This is a very rare vagrant to western Europe, with a single record of a bird wintering in a supermarket car park in Maidstone, Kent in 1989 and another from Corvo, Azores, in October 2012.
Golden-winged warblers breed in open scrubby areas, wetlands, and occasionally mature forest adjacent to those habitats. They lay 3–6 eggs (often 5) in a highly concealed cup nest on the ground or low in a bush.
These birds feed on insects, and spiders, most often leaf-roller caterpillars. Golden-winged warblers have strong gaping (opening) musculature for their bill, allowing them to uncover hidden caterpillars.
The song is highly variable, but is most often heard as a trilled bzzzzzzz buzz buzz buzz. The call is a buzzy chip or zip.
This species forms two distinctive hybrids with blue-winged warbler where their ranges overlap in the Great Lakes and New England area. The commoner, genetically dominant Brewster's warbler is gray above and whitish (male) or yellow (female) below. It has a black eyestripe and two white wing bars.
The rarer recessive Lawrence's warbler has a male plumage which is green and yellow above and yellow below, with white wing bars and the same face pattern as male Golden-winged. The female is gray above and whitish below with two yellow wing bars and the same face pattern as female Golden-winged. Both Brewster's and Lawrence's warblers can vary considerably in their physical features and can potentially sing songs of either the blue-winged or the golden-winged warblers.
Genetic introgression occurs across their range, producing cryptic hybrids (morphologically pure individuals with small amounts of blue-winged warbler DNA). These hybrids may be present in low numbers even on the edges of golden-winged warbler range, far from any populations of blue-winged warblers.
Birds May Have Sensed Severe Storms Days in Advance
The sudden departure of golden-winged warblers before deadly tornadoes has blown away scientists.
A golden-winged warbler (Vermivora chrysoptera) sings on a tree branch in Michigan.
Carrie Arnold
for National Geographic
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 18, 2014
Earlier this year, a group of scientists studying golden-winged warblers in Tennessee noticed something odd: The birds had taken a sudden detour from their breeding grounds.
Analysis of the data revealed that the birds took off for Florida several days in advance of a large, severe thunderstorm system that was advancing across the Great Plains.
A new study suggests that these warblers detected the severe weather and got the heck out of the way—an ability never before documented in birds.
The scientists theorize the birds were tipped off by infrasound—a type of low-frequency noise—produced by the storms. Although humans can't hear infrasound, birds can, and the destructive nature of these storms may make it advantageous for the birds to get out of the way despite the high-energy costs of flight.
"We were completely blown away by this behavior. It shows that the birds can do more than we give them credit for," said study co-author Gunnar Kramer, a population ecologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Mysterious Flight
Kramer and his colleagues happened upon the discovery by accident, while studying migration patterns of golden-winged warblers.
The songbird spends winters in Central and South America and migrates to the Great Lakes region and the Appalachians to breed and raise young.
To learn more details about this behavior, the team traveled to the Great Lakes and fitted some of the warblers with a small, lightweight geolocator that recorded their exact locations every few minutes, according to the study, published December 18 in the journal Current Biology.
In April 2014, the researchers tracked the birds to the Cumberland Mountains of eastern Tennessee to check on them. But when they arrived, the mountains were silent. Their warblers weren't there.
"We thought the birds were just hunkering down. It never occurred to me that they might have evacuated," Kramer said.
When the team checked on the warblers' locations via their geolocators, they discovered the birds were in Florida. One bird had even traveled to Cuba.
Several days later, however, the birds flew back to Tennessee, having mysteriously traveled more than 900 miles (1,500 kilometers) round-trip.
A chance look at a weather report gave scientists their hint—right around the time the birds left Tennessee, a severe weather system clobbered the Midwest, spawning 84 tornadoes that killed at least 35 people.
However, the scientists emphasize in the study that it's unknown exactly why the birds veered from their migration route in April 2014, and that the storms' infrasound was a "probable cue" to escape.
To Jonathan Hagstrum, a geophysicist at the United States Geological Survey who studies bird migration, the new research supports the idea that birds use infrasound during migration.
"These results show another way that birds can use low-frequency sound," said Hagstrum, who wasn't involved in the new study.
"They're not just using it to navigate, but to identify and avoid severe weather. It all fits in," he said.
news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141218-birds-weather-tornadoes-science-animals-environment/
Tornadic Storm Avoidance Behavior in Breeding Songbirds
Henry M. Streby, Gunnar R. Kramer, Sean M. Peterson, Justin A. Lehman, David A. Buehler, David E. Andersen
DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.10.079
Highlights
•Migrant songbirds evacuated their territories to circumvent a severe tornado outbreak
•Obligate migrants can make facultative migrations outside of normal migration periods
•Infrasound from tornadic storms could be a long-distance cue for evacuation migration
Summary
Migration is a common behavior used by animals of many taxa to occupy different habitats during different periods. Migrant birds are categorized as either facultative (i.e., those that are forced to migrate by some proximal cue, often weather) or obligate (i.e., those that migrate on a regular cycle). During migration, obligate migrants can curtail or delay flights in response to inclement weather or until favorable winds prevail, and they can temporarily reorient or reverse direction when ecological or meteorological obstacles are encountered. However, it is not known whether obligate migrants undertake facultative migrations and make large-scale movements in response to proximal cues outside of their regular migration periods. Here, we present the first documentation of obligate long-distance migrant birds undertaking a facultative migration, wherein breeding golden-winged warblers (Vermivora chrysoptera) carrying light-level geolocators performed a >1,500 km 5-day circumvention of a severe tornadic storm. The birds evacuated their breeding territories >24 hr before the arrival of the storm and atmospheric variation associated with it. The probable cue, radiating >1,000 km from tornadic storms, perceived by birds and influencing bird behavior and movements, is infrasound (i.e., sound below the range of human hearing). With the predicted increase in severity and frequency of similar storms as anthropogenic climate change progresses, understanding large-scale behavioral responses of animals to such events will be an important objective of future research.
www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(14)01428-6
New insights into genetic basis of bird migration
by Gail Mccormick, Pennsylvania State University
A team of researchers has identified a gene associated with migration in golden-winged and blue-winged warblers using whole genome sequencing and migration tracking technology. The team compared genetic differences among birds that winter in Central America and those that winter in South America. Credit: Jacob Spendelow
A gene newly associated with the migratory patterns of golden-winged and blue-winged warblers could lend insight into the longstanding question of how birds migrate across such long distances.
A new study led by researchers at Penn State and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is the first to combine whole genome sequencing and migration tracking technology to pinpoint a single gene associated with the complex suite of traits that determine migratory behavior. These findings may have important conservation implications for the declining populations of golden-winged warblers. The paper appears online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and describes the gene, which is associated with a neurological disorder in humans.
"The great migrations of the world have been inspiring people for hundreds of years," said David Toews, assistant professor of biology at Penn State and leader of the research team. "The migration of birds is particularly fascinating because small species primarily navigate alone, at night, and at high altitudes, so people do not always see it happening. They are in your backyard, and then they are gone."
Migration programming in birds is incredibly complex, encompassing a suite of neurological, physiological, and behavioral traits. Researchers have known for a few decades that there is a genetic component to migration. Recent studies in birds have identified large regions of the genome, encompassing hundreds of genes, associated with migration, but it has been more difficult to pinpoint the specific roles of any single gene.
"In this study, we found only one gene associated with the final wintering destination of golden-winged and blue-winged warblers," said Toews.
The researchers studied migration patterns in golden-winged warblers and blue-winged warblers, genetically-similar species that breed in the Midwest and northeastern United States. Some birds of each species migrate to wintering grounds in Central America, from Panama to Guatemala, while others travel further to South America, primarily Venezuela. Birds will usually return to similar breeding grounds and wintering sites each year.
Members of the research team from the University of Toledo previously determined the specific locations where these birds were wintering. They placed geolocators, essentially small backpacks with light sensors, on birds caught at breeding grounds in the U.S. The geolocators recorded light levels of their environment, which the researchers analyzed when the birds were captured the next year at their breeding sites.
"These light levels allow you to calculate the approximate location of birds along their migration track and at their wintering grounds, based on sunrise and sunset times and a few other factors," said Henry Streby of the Toledo team. "This information is particularly important for conservation management of golden-winged warblers, whose numbers are rapidly declining in the Appalachian Mountains. Conservation efforts have focused on protecting the breeding grounds, which is important, but declines also appear strongly related to habitat alteration and destruction in the wintering grounds."
"The global attention on the fires in the Amazon highlights the importance of these South American habitats, and these migratory birds illustrate an inextricable link between hemispheres," said Toews.
Importantly, the team from Toledo took genetic samples from the migrating birds, which allowed the group to investigate genetic differences between birds that winter in Central America and those that winter in South America. The majority of these differences occurred in a small region on the bird's Z chromosome, a sex-determining chromosome like the X and Y chromosomes in humans. Only one gene, called VPS13A, was present in this region.
Although the gene does not yet have any known function in birds, in humans it is associated with the neurodegenerative disorder chorea-acanthocytosis, which affects movement.
"As we come to better understand the role of this gene in humans, we may also gain important insights to its role in migration in birds," said Toews. "This is very speculative at this point, but we think it could be involved in clearing reactive oxygen species, which are free radicals that can build up during a prolonged migration and damage cells. We would like to perform additional studies to know when and in what tissues this gene is expressed in these birds. But because golden-winged warblers are facing declines, we may first investigate whether this gene is associated with migration in any of the other 50 or so migratory species of warblers, which may provide a more tractable way to study the gene."
According to the researchers, the gene appears to be a target of natural selection in birds that winter in South America.
"And that's really cool, because we don't always see natural selection operating on contemporary timelines for something like migratory traits that have been around for a long time."
phys.org/news/2019-08-insights-genetic-basis-bird-migration.html
Journal Reference:
David P. L. Toews et al. Selection on VPS13A linked to migration in a songbird, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1909186116
Abstract
Animal migration demands an interconnected suite of adaptations for individuals to navigate over long distances. This trait complex is crucial for small birds whose migratory behaviors—such as directionality—are more likely innate, rather than being learned as in many longer-lived birds. Identifying causal genes has been a central goal of migration ecology, and this endeavor has been furthered by genome-scale comparisons. However, even the most successful studies of migration genetics have achieved low-resolution associations, identifying large chromosomal regions that encompass hundreds of genes, one or more of which might be causal. Here we leverage the genomic similarity among golden-winged (Vermivora chrysoptera) and blue-winged (V. cyanoptera) warblers to identify a single gene—vacuolar protein sorting 13A (VPS13A)—that is associated with distinct differences in migration to Central American (CA) or South American (SA) wintering areas. We find reduced sequence variation in this gene region for SA wintering birds, and show this is the likely result of natural selection on this locus. In humans, variants of VPS13A are linked to the neurodegenerative disorder chorea-acanthocytosis. This association provides one of the strongest gene-level associations with avian migration differences.
www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/08/23/1909186116