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Digest: Morphological diversity in urban dark-eyed juncos.

Abigail E Magland
Published in: Evolution; international journal of organic evolution (2024)
Populations living in cities face challenges from these novel environments that are expected to drive evolutionary adaptation. Do separate populations of a species living in different cities show similar adaptations to the selection pressures imposed by urban environments? Diamant and Yeh (2024) address this question by comparing the morphological characteristics of dark-eyed juncos in 3 California cities to non-urban junco morphologies. They find that wing size is consistently smaller in more urbanized environments regardless of the population, but bill size tends to vary between urban populations.
Keyphrases
  • genetic diversity
  • genome wide