Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon: its complicated
Reblogged from GRRL Scientist: hosted by the Guardian website.The was originally posted in Maniraptora . Once the most abundant bird in the world with a population size estimated to be somewhere between 3 and 5 billion in the early and mid-1800s; the sudden extinction of the passenger pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, in 1914, raises the question of how such an abundant bird could have become extinct in less than 50 years. A newly published study combines high throughput DNA technologies, ecological niche modeling and reconstructions of annual production of acorns upon which the birds fed to show that the passenger pigeon was not always super-abundant. Instead, it was an "outbreak" species that experienced dramatic population fluctuations in response to variations in annual acorn production. Thus, the extinction of the passenger pigeon likely was due to the combined effects of natural population fluctuations and human over-exploitation. It was one of those career-alter...