NSF Postdoctoral Fellowships in Biology combine research and training components to prepare young scientists for careers in emerging areas where biology intersects with other scientific disciplines, in this case with mathematics and physical sciences. The Fellows are expected to lead the nation's scientific workforce of the future. This fellowship to Daniel Baldassarre supports molecular, ecological, and behavioral investigations of the vampire finch. Animals exhibit a wide array of behaviors that have been shaped by natural selection, and some of the most amazing ones involve extracting resources from the environment. One of the most bizarre foraging adaptations is found in a member of the Darwin's finch family, the vampire finch. As its name suggests, this bird feeds on the blood of larger animals, typically seabirds. These birds occur on two only tiny, remote islands in the Galápagos archipelago and many aspects of this behavior remain a mystery. The host institution for this fellowship is the University of Miami, and the sponsoring scientists are Drs. J. Albert Uy and Valerie Hower. Outreach to young students and citizen scientists through the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, using the engaging and charismatic vampire finches, promotes public understanding of evolution.
The research and training plan involves computationally intensive transcriptomic and proteomic analyses with in-depth fieldwork in the Galápagos Islands to investigate the evolution of blood-feeding by the vampire finch, a small tropical bird. The research examines the environmental conditions that may have favored the evolution of this behavior to determine if, for example, individuals feed on blood only when other resources are scarce. Genes expressed in the bird and the proteins produced in its digestive system are being analyzed to discover if this species has evolved physiological adaptations similar to those that allow animals like mosquitoes and ticks to feed on blood. This research is an example of how a multi-disciplinary approach with computational, labatory, and field techniques can shed light on how natural selection shapes the evolution of behaviors in the wild.
