Online repositories of photographs and videos provide insights into the evolution of skilled hindlimb movements in birds
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Date
2023
Authors
Gutiérrez-Ibáñez, Cristián
Amaral-Peçanha, Clara
Iwaniuk, Andrew N.
Wylie, Douglas R.
Baron, Jerome
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Springer Nature
Abstract
The ability to manipulate objects with limbs has evolved repeatedly among land tetrapods. Several selective forces have been proposed to explain the emergence of forelimb manipulation, however, work has been largely restricted to mammals, which prevents the testing of evolutionary hypotheses in a comprehensive evolutionary framework. In birds, forelimbs have gained the exclusive function of flight, with grasping transferred predominantly to the beak. In some birds, the feet are also used in manipulative tasks and appear to share some features with manual grasping and prehension in mammals, but this has not been systematically investigated. Here we use large online repositories of photographs and videos to quantify foot manipulative skills across a large sample of bird species (>1000 species). Our results show that a complex interaction between niche, diet and phylogeny drive the evolution of manipulative skills with the feet in birds. Furthermore, we provide strong support for the proposition that an arboreal niche is a key element in the evolution of manipulation in land vertebrates. Our systematic comparison of foot use in birds provides a solid base for understanding morphological and neural adaptations for foot use in birds, and for studying the convergent evolution of manipulative skills in birds and mammals.
Description
Open access article. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0) applies.
Keywords
Animal behavior , Hindlimb movements , Foot use in birds , Foot manipulation
Citation
Gutiérrez-Ibáñez, C., Amaral-Peçanha, C., Iwaniuk, A. N., Wylie, D. R., & Baron, J. (2023). Online repositories of photographs and videos provide insights into the evolution of skilled hindlimb movements in birds. Communications Biology, 6, Article 781. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-023-05151-z