‘nasa just emailed a wrench to space’ i genuinely, unironically love how i’ve come to a point where i just take this stuff in stride, like i was in 3rd grade when we got our first vcr and now we’re here. emailing wrenches to space. i love it so much.
Parrots are famously talkative, and a blue-fronted Amazon parrot named Moises—or at least its genome—is telling scientists volumes about the longevity and highly developed cognitive abilities that give parrots so much in common with humans. Perhaps someday, it will also provide clues about how parrots learn to vocalize so well.
Morgan Wirthlin, a BrainHub post-doctoral fellow in Carnegie Mellon University’s Computational Biology Department and first author of a report to appear in the Dec. 17 issue of the journal Current Biology, said she and her colleagues sequenced the genome of the blue-fronted Amazon and used it to perform the first comparative study of parrot genomes.
By comparing the blue-fronted Amazon with 30 other long- and short-lived birds—including four additional parrot species—she and colleagues at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and other entities identified a suite of genes previously not known to play a role in longevity that deserve further study. They also identified genes associated with longevity in fruit flies and worms.
“In many cases, this is the first time we’ve connected those genes to longevity in vertebrates,” she said.
Wirthlin, who began the study while a Ph.D. student in behavioral neuroscience at OHSU, said parrots are known to live up to 90 years in captivity—a lifespan that would be equivalent to hundreds of years for humans. The genes associated with longevity include telomerase, responsible for DNA repair of telomeres (the ends of chromosomes), which are known to shorten with age. Changes in these DNA repair genes can potentially turn cells malignant. The researchers have found evidence that changes in the DNA repair genes of long-lived birds appear to be balanced with changes in genes that control cell proliferation and cancer.
The researchers also discovered changes in gene-regulating regions of the genome—which seem to be parrot-specific—that were situated near genes associated with neural development. Those same genes are also linked with cognitive abilities in humans, suggesting that both humans and parrots evolved similar methods for developing higher cognitive abilities.
Hi! There’s a few reasons why they might leave on their own, but it can be broken down into two categories: intentional or accidental release. For reference, it takes about two weeks for a bird to go feral again.
Intentional releases happen when a falconer wants to put the bird back into the wild. In the US, a bird can only be released if it was a wild bird to begin with (well, releasing a captive bred bird requires different permitting and permissions). Usually, the falconer will wean the bird off of handling for a few weeks, then cut the jesses off and let the bird go. Sometimes it will hang around, but the birds feel no love/affection bond to the falconer, so if they aren’t being fed they will eventually move on.
Accidental releases usually happen due to bad weight management, or putting too much trust into the bird. If a bird is too heavy, it might not feel the need to come back. It could soar into the air, catch a thermal, and be gone. It also could get spooked and refuse to come back. It could catch something small, bring it to a tree, eat its fill, and then refuse to come back.
All in all it’s important to remember these are wild animals. Without the reward of food, these guys will usually go back to their wild state no problem.
My misunderstanding was that the ones being caught were adults that were a couple years old.
Nope! They’re less than a year. Trapping a bird past the one year mark is actually illegal, save for kestrels (at least in Texas), that are hard to tell the difference between a juvenile and an adult.
ifesbob 