There was one thing unusual concerning the turquoise-colored songbird flying round San Antonio in 2023. With its black-and-white tail bands and its jeering honk, it considerably resembled and appeared like a blue jay. However it had the face and low, two-tone rattling name of a inexperienced jay.
The chicken turned out to be an extraordinarily uncommon hybrid that some are calling a “grue jay.” Genetic testing confirmed the hybrid chicken had a inexperienced jay mom and a blue jay father, scientists report September 10 in Ecology and Evolution.
Although chicken hybrids aren’t unusual, a pairing between these two jays is outstanding as their ranges solely lately started to overlap because of human exercise, says Timothy Keitt, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist on the College of Texas at Austin.
The inexperienced jay (Cyanocorax yncas) is a tropical chicken. On the flip of this century, the one place they lived inside america was the Rio Grande Valley close to the Texas–Mexico border. The chicken’s vary extends all through Mexico and Central America, spanning as far south as Honduras. Nonetheless, because of the warming local weather, inexperienced jays have unfold north by lots of of kilometers and a number of other levels in latitude.
“And it occurred fairly shortly, possibly a 20-year-period,” Keitt says.
On the similar time, the vary of the blue jay (Cyanocitta cristata) is reaching farther west throughout Canada and america, together with into south central Texas. Ecologists recommend blue jays are following people into new areas, in search of wealthy meals sources in suburban environments.
Hybridization within the wild normally happens between species that share a current frequent ancestor. Nonetheless, the evolutionary break up between blue jays and inexperienced jays was not less than 7 million years in the past through the late Miocene Epoch. (The final frequent ancestor of people and chimpanzees additionally lived round this time.)
The truth that two organisms, which have been evolving independently, got here collectively to provide a viable offspring after 7 million years is superb, says Jamie Alfieri, an evolutionary biologist who researches speciation on the College of Iowa in Iowa Metropolis.
“It’s only a actually very long time. I imply, I don’t know the way else to say that. It’s a extremely massive quantity,” says Alfieri, who was not concerned in Keitt’s examine.
Why a inexperienced jay crossed the species divide to mate with a blue jay is a thriller. It might have been that each birds had been interested in novelty. Keitt says there have been situations the place a brand new tune kind has been most well-liked amongst birds in search of mates. For instance, researchers on the College of Lancaster discovered that a male blue tit is extra more likely to maintain a feminine’s consideration if he sings a novel tune.
One other speculation is that each birds had been on the far edges of their ranges. Unable to discover a mate amongst their very own species, pairing up was a kind of last-ditch effort.
Each methods are a danger: Hybrids are generally sterile, although with birds, hybrid males are extra possible to have the ability to reproduce than females. The noticed grue jay is male, so it’s attainable that it’s going to have offspring.
However whereas each blue and inexperienced jays are extremely social, the grue jay gave the impression to be by itself. Maybe the opposite blue jays that had been within the space acknowledged that it was totally different and wouldn’t settle for it into their group.
Whereas Keitt doubts that blue and inexperienced jays will merge into a brand new species, this hybrid highlights the bizarre and speedy ecological adjustments occurring because of human exercise.
“So buckle in, people,” he says. “We’re going to see very totally different outcomes,” plenty of uncommon climate and mixes of vegetation and animals we’ve by no means seen prior to now.
