In the remote ocean of the Atlantic Ocean, 3,500 kilometers from South America and 2,800 kilometers from southern Africa, there is a mysterious off-the-beaten-path island that is only half the size of Manhattan. Don't get me wrong, the name of this island is Inaccessible Island, and there are 6,000 red-eyed black birds living on the island, whether coincidentally or accidentally, their name also happens to be called the inaccessible island buzzard.
Well, it's not a coincidence, it's not a coincidence, it's just the names scientists give them. The inaccessible island buzzards can't fly, and the inaccessible island is also very isolated, which raises the question of how these black fat little badminton balls settled there?
In the 1920s, scientists first discovered these little guys who were full of food and had no heart all day, leisurely wandering around the island and stopping and pecking at what they saw. As strange as it may seem, scientists have also made a reasonable explanation that these little guys may have walked to the island millions of years ago through some kind of sunken land bridge, and then the sea flooded the land bridge, and they never went back. Scientists have classified it in one of their own genus, and the name sounds mysterious — the subgenus Atlantisia.
The team of Martin Stwand, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oregon, has studied the birds in recent years and discovered the mystery of their evolution. The researchers took blood samples from off-the-beaten-path buzzards, sequenced dna, and compared them with data from other buzzards.
The results suggest that the ancestors of these little guys may have arrived on the island from South America 1.5 million years ago and belonged to the genus Kuroda. It is well known that buzzards can fly anywhere and settle anywhere, and 53 extant or recently extinct species have been found on desert islands, and 32 species have lost some or all of their ability to fly.
The ancestors of these inaccessible island buzzards turned out to be flying athletes, just flying to this island to see, oh my mother! The sun, the sand, the hospitable bugs, the lazy sunbathing, and the scary big guys like cats, dogs, and dogs, life can be so sweet and moist that there is no longer any need to fly around in the sky with small wings and blood-red eyes. Most of the buzzards that fly to the desert island, precisely because there is no pressure to prey, do not need to consume more energy, so they lose the ability to fly under natural selection, and become a chubby badminton ball, which looks cute, but it is silly and stupid.
However, the absence of carnivores to get the buzzards to move their wings a few times is obviously not a good thing, they can only pray that the island will never have a two-legged walk, can go anywhere large mammals come, even if they come do not come with some of their seemingly cute pets - Australia is a precedent, when European colonists arrived with their pet cats more than two hundred years ago, the local birds and reptiles never expected this to be a terrible disaster, no, A great slaughter and catastrophe. Today, there are at least two million wildcats in Australia, eating more than 700 million birds and reptiles each year, and causing the extinction of 63 species of birds, reptiles and mammals.
From this I think of the current human beings, many people have been pampered and used to getting by all day in food and air conditioning, will they also become such stupid buzzards, when will an unexpected disaster lead to the collapse of the entire civilization? The reasons for this deserve our deep consideration and vigilance.