Darwin had Galapagos finches. Norway has… house sparrows?
02/26/21 • 25 min
The different species of Galapagos finches, with their specially evolved beaks that allow them to eat specific foods, helped Charles Darwin understand that organisms can evolve over time to better survive in their environment.
Now, nearly 200 years later and thousands of miles away, biologists are learning some surprising lessons about evolution from northern Norwegian populations of the humble house sparrow (Passer domesticus).
Darwin’s finches evolved on the exotic, volcanic Galapagos Islands. NTNU’s house sparrows are dispersed over a group of 18 islands in Helgeland, in an archipelago that straddles the Arctic Circle.
Every summer since 1993, when NTNU Professor Bernt-Erik Sæther initiated the House Sparrow Project, a group of biologists has travelled to the islands collect data on the sparrows. They capture baby birds, measure different parts of their bodies, take a tiny blood sample, and then put a unique combination of coloured rings on their legs that help researchers identify the birds throughout their lifetime.
Those decades of research have given researchers information that can be helpful in managing threatened and endangered species. They have also done some experiments where they made evolution happen in real time — and then watched what happened when they let nature run its course.
And then there was the series of experiments where they learned more than you might want to know about sparrow dating preferences, and about rogue sparrow fathers who court exhausted sparrow mothers — and then fathered children with the cute little she-bird next door.
Our guests for today’s show were Henrik Jensen, Thor Harald Ringsby and Stefanie Muff.
You can find a transcript of the show here.
Selected academic and popular science articles:
From NTNU’s online research magazine, Norwegian SciTech News:
Why aren’t house sparrows as big as geese?
Inbreeding detrimental for survival
Why house sparrows lay big and small eggs
On Darwin
Darwin, Charles (1859) On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: J. Murray.
Weiner, J. (2014). The beak of the finch: A story of evolution in our time. Random House.
Sulloway, F. J. (1982). Darwin and his finches: The evolution of a legend. Journal of the History of Biology, 15, 1-53.
Sulloway, F. J. (1982). Darwin's conversion: the Beagle voyage and its aftermath. Journal of the History of Biology, 15, 325-396.
Academic articles from the House Sparrow Project:
- Araya-Ajoy, Yimen; Ranke, Peter Sjolte; Kvalnes, Thomas; Rønning, Bernt; Holand, Håkon; Myhre, Ane Marlene; Pärn, Henrik; Jensen, Henrik; Ringsby, Thor Harald; Sæther, Bernt-Erik; Wright, Jonathan. (2019) Characterizing morphological (co)variation using structural equation models: Body size, allometric relationships and evolvability in a house sparrow metapopulation. Evolution. vol. 73 (3).
- Kvalnes, Thomas; Ringsby, Thor Harald; Jensen, Henrik; Hagen, Ingerid Julie; Rønning, Bernt; Pärn, Henrik; Holand, Håkon; Engen, Steinar; Sæther, Bernt-Erik. (2017) Reversal of response to artificial selection on body size in a wild passerine bird. Evolution. vol. 71 (8).
- Ringsby, Thor Harald; Jensen, Henrik; Pärn, Henrik; Kvalnes, Thomas; Boner, Winnie; Gillespie, Robert; Holand, Hå...
The different species of Galapagos finches, with their specially evolved beaks that allow them to eat specific foods, helped Charles Darwin understand that organisms can evolve over time to better survive in their environment.
Now, nearly 200 years later and thousands of miles away, biologists are learning some surprising lessons about evolution from northern Norwegian populations of the humble house sparrow (Passer domesticus).
Darwin’s finches evolved on the exotic, volcanic Galapagos Islands. NTNU’s house sparrows are dispersed over a group of 18 islands in Helgeland, in an archipelago that straddles the Arctic Circle.
Every summer since 1993, when NTNU Professor Bernt-Erik Sæther initiated the House Sparrow Project, a group of biologists has travelled to the islands collect data on the sparrows. They capture baby birds, measure different parts of their bodies, take a tiny blood sample, and then put a unique combination of coloured rings on their legs that help researchers identify the birds throughout their lifetime.
Those decades of research have given researchers information that can be helpful in managing threatened and endangered species. They have also done some experiments where they made evolution happen in real time — and then watched what happened when they let nature run its course.
And then there was the series of experiments where they learned more than you might want to know about sparrow dating preferences, and about rogue sparrow fathers who court exhausted sparrow mothers — and then fathered children with the cute little she-bird next door.
Our guests for today’s show were Henrik Jensen, Thor Harald Ringsby and Stefanie Muff.
You can find a transcript of the show here.
Selected academic and popular science articles:
From NTNU’s online research magazine, Norwegian SciTech News:
Why aren’t house sparrows as big as geese?
Inbreeding detrimental for survival
Why house sparrows lay big and small eggs
On Darwin
Darwin, Charles (1859) On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: J. Murray.
Weiner, J. (2014). The beak of the finch: A story of evolution in our time. Random House.
Sulloway, F. J. (1982). Darwin and his finches: The evolution of a legend. Journal of the History of Biology, 15, 1-53.
Sulloway, F. J. (1982). Darwin's conversion: the Beagle voyage and its aftermath. Journal of the History of Biology, 15, 325-396.
Academic articles from the House Sparrow Project:
- Araya-Ajoy, Yimen; Ranke, Peter Sjolte; Kvalnes, Thomas; Rønning, Bernt; Holand, Håkon; Myhre, Ane Marlene; Pärn, Henrik; Jensen, Henrik; Ringsby, Thor Harald; Sæther, Bernt-Erik; Wright, Jonathan. (2019) Characterizing morphological (co)variation using structural equation models: Body size, allometric relationships and evolvability in a house sparrow metapopulation. Evolution. vol. 73 (3).
- Kvalnes, Thomas; Ringsby, Thor Harald; Jensen, Henrik; Hagen, Ingerid Julie; Rønning, Bernt; Pärn, Henrik; Holand, Håkon; Engen, Steinar; Sæther, Bernt-Erik. (2017) Reversal of response to artificial selection on body size in a wild passerine bird. Evolution. vol. 71 (8).
- Ringsby, Thor Harald; Jensen, Henrik; Pärn, Henrik; Kvalnes, Thomas; Boner, Winnie; Gillespie, Robert; Holand, Hå...
Previous Episode
Not enough COVID-19 tests? No problem, we'll make them!
Not enough COVID-19 tests? No problem, we’ll make some!
When the coronavirus first transformed from a weird respiratory disease centered in Wuhan, China to a global pandemic, no one was really prepared. Worldwide, no one had enough masks, personal protective gear and definitely — not enough tests.
The problem was especially acute in places like Norway, a small country that had to compete on a global market to get anything and everything.
What happened when a molecular biologist, some engineers and a couple of PhDs and postdocs put their heads together to design a completely different kind of coronavirus test — and how it changed lives in India, Denmark and Nepal. This last country was given coronavirus tests as NTNU’s annual Christmas gift, in coordination with a volunteer organization called NepalimedNorway.
Our guests on today’s show are Magnar Bjørås, Sulalit Bandyopadhyay, Vegar Ottesen, Anuvansh Sharma and Tonje Steigedal.
There's a transcript for today's show here.
You can read more in detail about the tests here: https://www.ntnu.edu/ntnu-covid-19-test
And here is a list of articles from NTNU and SINTEF’s online research magazine, Norwegian SciTech News:
NTNU’s new COVID-19 test to be used in India and Denmark
NTNU establishes a factory to produce coronavirus tests
From thousands of tiny balls to 150,000 tests per week
This episode was written, recorded, edited and produced by Nancy Bazilchuk. Sound design and editorial assistance from Randi Lillealtern at Historiebruket.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Next Episode
Old bones and modern germs
Trondheim, Norway’s first religious and national capital, has a rich history that has been revealed over decades of archaeological excavations. One question archaeologists are working on right now has a lot of relevance in during a pandemic: Can insight into the health conditions of the past shed light on pandemics in our own time? Now, with the help of old bones, latrine wastes and dental plaque, researchers are learning about how diseases evolved in medieval populations, and what society did to stem them — and how that might help us in the future.
Our guests for this episode were Axel Christophersen, a professor of historical archaeology at the NTNU University Museum; Tom Gilbert, a professor at the NTNU University Museum and head of the Center for Evolutionarly Hologenomics based at the University of Copenhagen; and Elisabeth Forrestad Swensen, a PhD candidate at the NTNU University Museum.
You can read more about the MedHeal research project on the project’s home page.
Here are some of the academic articles on medieval Trondheim related to the podcast:
Zhou Z, Lundstrøm I, Tran-Dien A, Duchêne S, Alikhan NF, Sergeant MJ, Langridge G, Fotakis AK, Nair S, Stenøien HK, Hamre SS, Casjens S, Christophersen A, Quince C, Thomson NR, Weill FX, Ho SYW, Gilbert MTP, Achtman M. Pan-genome Analysis of Ancient and Modern Salmonella enterica Demonstrates Genomic Stability of the Invasive Para C Lineage for Millennia. Curr Biol. 2018 Aug 6;28(15):2420-2428.
Stian Suppersberger Hamre, Valérie Daux- Stable oxygen isotope evidence for mobility in medieval and post-medieval Trondheim, Norway,
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Vol. 8, 2016, pp 416-425,
A transcript of the show is available here.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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