variability in avian eggshell colour a comparative study of museum eggshells可变性在鸟类蛋壳颜色的比较研究博物馆蛋壳.pdfVIP

Variability in Avian Eggshell Colour: A Comparative Study of Museum Eggshells 1 1 1 2 1 Phillip Cassey *, Steven J. Portugal , Golo Maurer , John G. Ewen , Rebecca L. Boulton , Mark E. Hauber3, Tim M. Blackburn2 1 Centre for Ornithology, School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom, 2 Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, London, United Kingdom, 3 Department of Psychology, Hunter College of the City University of New York, New York, New York, United States of America Abstract Background: The exceptional diversity of coloration found in avian eggshells has long fascinated biologists and inspired a broad range of adaptive hypotheses to explain its evolution. Three main impediments to understanding the variability of eggshell appearance are: (1) the reliable quantification of the variation in eggshell colours; (2) its perception by birds themselves, and (3) its relation to avian phylogeny. Here we use an extensive museum collection to address these problems directly, and to test how diversity in eggshell coloration is distributed among different phylogenetic levels of the class Aves. Methodology and Results: Spectrophotometric data on eggshell coloration were collected from a taxonomically representative sample of 251 bird species to determine the change in reflectance across different wavelengths and the taxonomic level where the variation resides. As many hypotheses for the evolution of eggshell coloration assume that egg colours provide a communication signal for an avian receiver, we also modelled reflectance spectra of shell coloration for the avian visual system. We found that a majority of species have eggs with similar background colour (l