Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Hawaiian honeycreeper
Summary
Hawaiian honeycreepers are a group of small birds endemic to Hawaii. They are members of the finch family Fringillidae, closely related to the rosefinches (Carpodacus), but many species have evolved features unlike those present in any other finch. Their great morphological diversity is the result of adaptive radiation in an insular environment. Many have been driven to extinction since the first humans arrived in Hawaii, with extinctions increasing over the last 2 centuries following European discovery of the islands, with habitat destruction and especially invasive species being the main causes.
Before the introduction of molecular phylogenetic techniques, the relationship of the Hawaiian honeycreepers to other bird species was controversial. The honeycreepers were sometimes categorized as a family Drepanididae, other authorities considered them a subfamily, Drepanidinae, of Fringillidae, the finch family. The entire group was also called Drepanidini in treatments where buntings and American sparrows (Passerellidae) were included in the finch family; this term is preferred for just one subgroup of the birds today. Most recently, the entire group has been subsumed into the finch subfamily Carduelinae.
The Hawaiian honeycreepers are the sister taxon to the Carpodacus rosefinches. Their ancestors are thought to have been from Asia and diverged from Carpodacus about 7.2 million years ago, and they are thought to have first arrived and radiated on the Hawaiian Islands between 5.7-7.2 million years ago, which was roughly the same time that the islands of Ni'ihau and Kauai formed. The lineage of the recently extinct po'ouli (Melamprosops) was the most ancient of the Hawaiian honeycreeper lineages to survive to recent times, diverging about 5.7-5.8 million years ago. The lineage containing Oreomystis and Paroreomyza was the second to diverge, diverging about a million years after the po'ouli's lineage. Most of the other lineages with highly distinctive morphologies are thought to have originated in the mid-late Pliocene, after the formation of Oahu but prior to the formation of Maui.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.