Darwin's Finches. Experiences in the Galapagos Islands

While the search goes on for the genes involved in the evolutionary divergence of Darwin’s finches*, together with the molecular mechanisms involved in morphogenesis of the beak and how those mechanisms are controlled, the Galapagos are visited by those keen to see these finches and how they live. But even experienced birdwatchers can have difficulty in identifying what they are seeing. Some species are easy to recognise, the Warbler Finch, for example. But for the Ground finches in particular identification can be puzzling. Colour is of no help. The beak is the key feature together with body size. When you think you have it worked out on one island, the move to a new island the next day can leave one bewildered. That is because a large member of a small species on island A can be very similar to a small individual of a larger species on island B. We found the Small and Medium Ground Finches on Santa Cruz could produce very puzzled observers. Peter and Rosemary Grant^† explain why: …medium ground finches on Santa Cruz are larger on average and vary much more than elsewhere. The beak is the key distinguishing feature but the variation within a single species can be so great that there can be overlap with another species. It is not impossible that you may be looking at a hybrid. Hybridisation is said to be rare but the offspring are fertile.

During our trip to the Galapagos we saw 10 of the 13 recognised species (ignoring the split of the Warbler Finch). The only real site for the really rare Mangrove Finch is closed to visitors (although the odd party has been lucky with a sighting elsewhere). We did not go high enough on Floreana for a Medium Tree Finch, the only island on which it occurs. We did go to places where we might have seen Large Tree Finches but on the days with the best chances and good access the weather closed in.

Sighting is one thing, video photography is another. I managed to get some footage of six species, especially those that seem to have no fear. This footage is shown here but is better seen by pressing the view in YouTube option:

I see that very recently published field guides are getting better reviews than their predecessors, especially when it comes to how they deal with Darwin’s finches. The books available up to a short time ago were really not very good. The human guides are excellent but they are not close to hand all the time to witness the fleeting appearance of a bird.

What I had not realised until we got there is just how tough and subject to changes in weather and climate some of the island environments are. Variations in rainfall, for example, affect the plants and invertebrates that provide the food for the finches. Droughts produce population crashes as well as marked selection for beak size with the outcome depending on which other species are present on a particular island competing for seed of the same size. This appreciation of the ecological factors in the evolution of Darwin’s finches is why I now suggest that visitors to the Galapagos should read the Grants’ book^† that summarises their research before going rather than after, like I did.

Equally as fascinating as Darwin’s finches are the human visitors to the Galapagos. Despite all the vessels having excellent naturalist guides on board the level of ignorance is astonishing. The problem seems to be that the Galapagos is sold as a destination for adventure holidays, particularly by travel agents in the USA, and hordes pour onto the popular islands seemingly immune to the acquisition of knowledge or interest in the natural world.

People watching is, therefore, in small doses also an educational experience not to be missed. Some of the conversations would form great lines for a sitcom. How can anybody in the western world escape knowing the existence of Darwin’s finches and why they are important? Even creationists have heard of Darwin’s finches. Well, there are lots of visitors to the Galapagos who have escaped knowing.

* http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/14/95
† I cannot recommend the Grants' book more strongly. It is clear they succeeded in achieving the goal they set out in the preface: Our goal, like [David] Lack's, was to capture the essentials and the highlights for an intended audience of students. Grant, P.R. & Grant, B.R. 2008. How and Why Species Multiply. The Radiation of Darwin's Finches. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Hong Kong Naturalist: A journal and an original subscriber - R.A.C. North

A few years ago I was pleased to buy a complete bound set of Hong Kong Naturalist. Founded by G.A.C. Herklots, it was published from 1930 until the Japanese invasion of 1941. I was pleased to find that the colour plates were intact except, strangely, in the last two volumes (bound differently and of a larger page size than the others) where they had been crudely torn out. They were bought on eBay from a bookseller in the south of England for much less than the price of postage. Each volume is signed inside the cover and I was surprised when I recognised the owner from the signature, R.A.C. North.

Roland Arthur Charles North CMG was Secretary of Chinese Affairs in the Hong Kong Government from 1936 until the surrender of Hong Kong to the Japanese invaders on Christmas Day 1941. He was a key figure in a controversy that occupied the Government of Hong Kong and the British Government after Japan unconditionally surrendered on 14 August 1945 and the re-establishment of British administration by the brilliant Colonial Secretary (two higher than North in the civil service hierarchy), Franklin Gimson, who had only arrived in Hong Kong a couple of days before the Japanese invasion. After the arrival of Admiral Harcourt with ships from the Pacific Fleet, British sovereignty was re-established in September 1945.

The controversy centred on the role of leading figures in the Chinese community during the Japanese occupation. Collaboration beyond the point of necessity was the charge. Some gave a dinner for the departing Japanese Governor after the surrender. Badly-nourished internees emerging from Stanley were enraged by seeing individuals who “had shouted ‘Banzai!’ yesterday singing ‘God Save the King’ today”¹. North, operating from the old French Mission Building [now housing the Orwellian-titled Court of Final Appeal], put out a press statement on 2 October to counter the public outrage at the acceptance of these leaders back into the fold of the new  administration saying that he had asked these individuals in January 1942, ‘to take upon themselves what should have been my duty in working with the Japanese’. The new Government crushed the view that one or more individuals should be put on trial and the leaders moved back into a position of influence with the government. The feeling though persisted amongst both the wartime Chinese residents who had been extremely badly treated by the Japanese and the British. I remember driving along a road in Hong Kong with a policeman friend in 1967. He suddenly exploded with ‘That road [named after one of the Chinese gentry involved] should be re-named. We don’t want collaborators like that being commemorated.’ But they were.

North, with the rest of the internees, was repatriated to UK after issuing his statement in October 1945; he arrived in Southampton on 9 November on the Royal Mail Lines ship Highland Monarch. He was appointed CMG (Supplement to London Gazette, 13 June 1946).

Thanks to a family website on ancestry.com and websites centred on his father, the artist John William North ARA (1842-1924), I have pieced the following account together.

J.W. North was a member of the Idyllic School of painters of Victorian England. A website which records his activities is maintained by his great-grandson by ‘his mistress, muse and model Maria Milton’². R.A.C. North was born to Selina Weetch, J.W. North’s wife, on 28 January 1989 at Beggearnhuish House, Nettlecombe, Somerset. Educated at Oxford, he joined the colonial service in 1912 as a Cadet 2nd Class. He married Leo Catherine Greening, a New Zealander, in 1928 in Hong Kong. According to one report, he offered to return to Hong Kong after his recovery from Hong Kong but was considered too old and retired in 1947 after working for a short time in the ‘Empire’ Office, presumably the Colonial Office. He was then 58. I seem to remember that normal retirement age from the colonial service was 55. He did return to Hong Kong, with his wife and daughter, in 1947 on his way to live in Australia; they left Southampton on P&O's Strathmore on 4 March 1947. From then until he died in 1961, aged 72, he lived with his family at Katoomba, New South Wales. After his death, his widow Leo (died 1976) and daughter, Philippa, returned to live in Somerset. Philippa died in 2005.

My guess is that what are now my copies of Hong Kong Naturalist were sold after Philippa’s death. But what had happened to them during the war. Had they been sent by North to safe keeping along with his family as the threat of war in the Far East grew? Had they been kept by him at Stanley during internment? The possibility of their being left in a ‘safe’ place in Hong Kong can be discounted since there was no such thing. From their appearance and binding (the last two non-matching volumes were bound by the Bookbinding Department, St Louis Ind. School, Hong Kong) they do not seem to have been stored in Hong Kong for long. The cockroaches then rife in houses and offices made short work of the glue in the bindings. The last two volumes are varnished to prevent attack and there are only slight signs of cockroach damage to the first eight. My guess is that the last two volumes were bound and then sent away from Hong Kong after the final part of volume X was published in February 1941.

Why is North interesting in terms of the biological sciences in Hong Kong. I think he is an illustration of the all-round civil administrator, now disappeared, with wide interests. The Hong Kong Naturalist represents the phenomenon, characteristic of a its age, of a journal that interested professional biologists, geologists, meteorologists and archaeologists as well as amateur natural historians and those interested in the natural world.

My volumes are in my bookshelf. However, other would-be purchasers of the Hong Kong Naturalist need no longer look for the uncommon printed and bound volumes. It can be viewed online at the website, Hong Kong Journals Online in its entirety:

http://hkjo.lib.hku.hk/exhibits/show/hkjo/home

R.A.C. North's volumes of The Hong Kong Naturalist
on my bookshelves

1 Snow, Philip. 2003. The Fall of Hong Kong. New Haven and London: Yale

2 http://www.southwilts.com/site/The-Idyllists/index.htm


Modified on 21 September 2015

Who was Marples, B.J. (1932)?

Twenty-five years before Knut Schmidt-Nielsen discovered salt glands in birds, the structure and development of the nasal or supraorbital glands – that turned out to be the salt glands – were studied by B.J. Marples at the University of  Manchester¹. The late Jim Linzell and I quoted his work in our monograph on salt glands². However, his name was unfamiliar to us and we had no idea what had become of him. I always wanted to ask Marples why had worked on the nasal glands. Nothing of their remarkable function was known and the only function anybody could think of was to wash seawater out of the nostrils. Wrong!

Only when reading Whose Bird?³ last year did I find the answer. Brian John Marples (1907-1997) was, from 1937 until 1966, Professor of Zoology at Otago University in New Zealand. Like so many zoologists of that era, his interests were wide-ranging, if firmly grounded in the Oxford school of comparative anatomy of Goodrich and de Beer. An obituary in the Yearbook of the Royal Society of New Zealand⁴ provides an excellent account of his interests and achievements in ornithology, arachnology and vertebrate palaeontology (particularly the fossil penguins of the Oligocene).

Marples’ (Marples’s when I did O-level English) Penguin (Palaeeudyptes marplesi Brodkorb, 1963) from the Late Eocene was named in his honour. The extinct birds in this genus start at the size of the Emperor Penguin⁵.

Again, like so many of his British contemporaries, it is reported that his lecture delivery was in the languid style with diagrams drawn on the blackboard. It seems that he retired early because the university thought his department needed an infusion of experimental biology. He returned to Woodstock, near Oxford.

So, while we were writing the monograph, Marples was living near Oxford and, had we known that, I could have asked him how he came to work on nasal glands and whether or not he had an inkling that they could prove to be more important than was thought at the time.

¹Marples, B. J. 1932. The structure and development of the nasal glands of birds. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 102, 829 – 844.

²Peaker, M. & Linzell, J.L. 1975. Salt Glands in Birds and Reptiles. Cambridge University Press (ISBN 0 521 20629 4).

³Beolens, B. & Watkins, M. 2003. Whose Bird? London: Christopher Helm (ISBN 0-300-10359-X)

^{4 http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/publications/reports/yearbooks/year2000/obituaries/brian-marples/
5 http://nzbirdsonline.org.nz/species/marples-penguin}

BBC: Losing the Plot

Last year I met somebody who had worked at the BBC’s Natural History Unit in Bristol. I enquired how a producer with whom I had worked on a programme in the 1990s was. ‘Oh, she was made redundant’, came the reply. Now I need not tell you that the Natural History Unit has been and remains to be singularly successful. But then we read that in addition to the massive pay-offs to top BBC executives (I have, incidentally, never discovered what ‘executives’ actually do) the Head of Human Resources (i.e. the Personnel Officer) has been paid £320,000 per annum. Need I say more by way of explaining why the BBC is imploding.

And do not risk mentioning the science coverage to me. An explosion of expletives is the likely outcome. The last Horizon I managed to watch the whole way through was a really awful programme on dinosaurs and the extraction of ancient DNA. I pitied the scientists who had taken part in this repetitive, dumbed down coverage with a story that flew off at every available tangent. The science flagship was holed below the water line some years ago. The original producers who launched the series in 1964 must be watching from somewhere the BBC’s treatment of science with horror.

Human Pregnancy: Gestation Period Variation Compared with Nanny Goats

One of the stories running during this year’s ‘silly season’, when news media are desperately trying to fill newspapers, radio, television and websites, was one highlighting research¹ which showed, in the words of the BBC News website, Pregnancy length “varies naturally by up to five weeks”.

Great surprise was expressed about this range of variation (14% of the mean ovulation to delivery period of 268 days). In practical terms the sheer stupidity of giving expectant mothers a ‘due date’ (with the implication that being ‘overdue’ is abnormal) was highlighted. In these days where education in biological systems has declined to the extent that the public expect certainty in all things biological and medical, the reports helped to highlight that variation and uncertainty are to be expected.

Reading of the extent of the variation, I tried to remember the variation I had found in the goat. In 1978 I collected all the data from the then goat herd at what is now the Babraham Institute that had been recorded between 1954 and 1977, a total of 374 cases². The mean time between mating and delivery was 150 days (as also found by Sydney Arthur Asdell in 1929). Although 90% of births occurred between 146 and 154 days, the full range was 135-159 days (24 days). The percentage variation (24/150) of 16 is very similar to the latest human data.

So, if we have 14% variation for the human gestation period and 16% for the caprine, what about other mammals? A quick look through a UFAW Handbook and elsewhere suggests a similar level of variation (cat 14%, dog 13%, rabbit 22%, guinea pig 11%, rat 14%). Somebody must have noted this before somewhere but if they have I cannot remember it nor can find reference to it.

Is the variation in the length of pregnancy the simple result in differences in the rate of development of the fetus? Or adaptive in that the time of parturition can be controlled? Or both?

As work on the initiation of parturition by activation of the fetal adrenal developed during the 1970s, the talk in the coffee room was that fetal control of the onset could not be the whole story since some herd animals clearly synchronised parturition in addition to synchronising oestrus. Wildebeest were the prime example. The extent of the control is illustrated by Berger’s studies on American Bison³. Gestation was shorter by approximately 6 days in those females that mated after the seasonal peak, thereby ensuring that births were synchronised with the females that had mated at the peak. There was a difference in whether or not the females were in good body condition. Gestation was earlier in those in good condition but not in those in poor condition. Clearly though there is an advantage in ensuring that births are synchronised since delivering early came with a cost. The tradeoff was that the offspring of those females that delivered early were approximately 20 kg lighter when 6 months old. Achieving synchrony, presumably to lessen the chances of predation, is clearly an important reproductive tactic. But are we any the wiser now as to the physiological mechanism of this control than we were in the mid-1970s?

Finally, is there any evidence of adaptive control of the onset of parturition in human mothers? I know of no evidence, only of all sorts of attempts to get things moving. I have seen the exertion of ascending the Peak in Hong Kong along Hatton Road as one try; the eating of a very large roast-beef dinner as another. Did they work? Well, the babies appeared eventually.

¹ Jukic, A.M., Baird, D.D., Weinberg, C.R., McConnhaughey, D.R. & Wilcox, A.J. 2013. Length of human pregnancy and contributors to its natural variation. Human Reproduction doi:10.1093/humrep/det297

² Peaker, M. 1978. Gestation period and litter size in the goat. British Veterinary Journal 134, 379-383.

³ Berger, J. 1992. Facilitation of Reproductive Synchrony by Gestation Adjustment in Gregarious Mammals: A New Hypothesis. Ecology 73, 323-329.

The Eponym Dictionary of Amphibians: Where’s Conrau?

Starting in 2003 with Whose Bird?, the Eponym Dictionary series (mammals following birds, then reptiles and, this year amphibians^†) has provided interest and amusement in epi-zoology. As the series has gone on, information from earlier volumes is often repeated, as a necessity since collectors, benefactors and museum workers often have birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians named after them. There is particular overlap with reptiles and amphibians and I was often miffed to find I had already read an entry in one of the other volumes. I took three double pages at random and found that a third of entries were repeats from earlier volumes.

I found a few omissions. The most remarkable I noted was the absence of Gustav Conrau who collected in the Cameroons in the closing years of the 19th century. He does appear in the volume on reptiles for the gecko, Lygodactylus conraui. Conrau should appear in the volume on amphibians for the genus Conraua, now comprising six species including that famous amphibian, the Goliath Frog, Conraua goliath. The genus was erected by Fritz Nieden in 1908 for G. robusta (Die Amphibienfauna von Kamerun. Mitteilungen des zoologischen Museums Berlin 3, 489-518) and the Goliath Frog, described by Boulenger in 1906 as Rana goliath, was moved into it by Nieden.

The story of Conrau, a German trader and labour recruiter in Cameroon is told in the Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles. He had recruited labour from the Bangwa people for a plantation to the south. When he returned, the Bangwa thought their labourers must have died since they were not with him. The Bangwa held him hostage against their men’s return. He was wounded while trying to escape. He probably killed himself to avoid being captured although he may have been shot by his pursuers. The Germans sent two punitive expeditions as a consequence.

Fritz Nieden (1883-1942), incidentally, does appear – for the caecilian Boulengerula niedeni described in 2005.

^†The Eponym Dictionary of Amphibians. 2013. Beolens, B., Watkins, M., Grayson, M. Exeter: Pelagic Publishing

Donors of Reptiles to London Zoo 1914/15: 9. C.R. Walker and Mons. de Southoff

I reach the end of this series of posts with failure. I have been unable to find any more information on two donors. This is what Clin Keeling wrote in A Short History of British Reptile Keeping:

First there was one C.R. Walker, F.Z.S., of The Vivarium, West Bromwich, near Birmingham, who during the early days of the war sent, and received on an exchange basis, quite a lot of material to Regent's Park; for example one consignment of his consisted of twenty-five assorted Skinks, Geckos (including the New Zealand species) and Tree Frogs, while during research in another direction I made the fascinating discovery that on 15th October 1913 London's first Soft-shelled Turtles (Trionyx) came from him. As far as we're concerned just who and/or what he was must, pro tem, remain a mystery, although it sounds very much to me as though The Vivarium was a shop that specialised in animals of this kind – in which case it must have been one of the very first in the country and possibly indicative that even at that period there was more demand for them than wenow realise  – or it could even have been some kind of reptile display, or both. As things stand, though, we must leave it there in the shadowy land of speculation.

The only thing I do know is that C.R. Walker was not a Fellow of the Zoological Society in 1910 or 1913. There is a speculative geographical connexion with Herbert Tomlin Pollitt (23 June 1013 post) but that is all I have been able to find. This one needs more work in the Zoo Library because it would be very interesting to shed more light, for the reasons Clin explained, on just who Walker was and what The Vivarium did.

Finally, I have also been unable to find anything about the Mons. de Southoff who donated European salamanders and snakes.