Amazing nature #28 - Cardinal gynandromorph 🐦
The world is composed of a feminine principle and a masculine principle that give a gender to all living beings. This is the norm, however, there are cases in which these principles merge and coexist conspicuously in an organism (since in reality, all things contain both genders). Such is the case with gynandromorphic animals -- which exhibit characteristics of both sexes.
You don't have to be an ornithologist to know that the red Northern Cardinals are male and those brown-grey are female. But what about Cardinalis Cardinalis which has red feathers on one side of its body and greyish brown feathers on the other? Well, that Cardinal is half male half female, of course, and only one bird with this strange characteristic has been observed, in northwestern Illinois.
This is an example of a phenomenon that biologists call bilateral gynandromorphism and the peculiar bird was observed for more than 40 days between December 2008 and March 2010, and undoubtedly caught the attention of the scientists who discovered it.
"It was amazing when the bird was seen from one side that looked like a normal male and then on the other side looked like a normal female,"
said Dr. Brian D. Peer, professor of biology at Western Illinois University in Macomb and one of the scientists.
"It wasn't until you could see the two halves of the bird that you realized it was a truly unique individual," he added.
Beyond biological interest, this cardinal is a living symbol of the dual nature of life, which is reconciled in the conjunction of opposites, in the unitary dance of Yin-Yang. All things are ultimately gynandromorphic, recharged for a moment to an aspect of existence, but always partakers of the whole.
But not only the appearance of the bird was strange, but its behavior was also out of the ordinary. While Peer and his collaborator wrote an article published in the December 2014 issue of the Wilson Journal of Ornithology, they never heard the bird vocalizing or sharing with another cardinal.
"Their behavior was never that of a typical cardinal male or female," Peer told the Huffington Post.
As explained by New Scientist, the bird's bizarre plumage arose because its sex chromosomes were not properly segregated after fertilization. The researchers tried to capture the cardinal for DNA testing but were unable to. However, experiments in chickens have shown that gynandromorphs tend to have more male cells in the middle of their body with male plumage and mostly female cells in the other half, where they have female plumage.
A gynandromorph is an organism that contains both male and female characteristics. This can be seen in butterflies, crustaceans, and birds, where male and female characteristics can be seen physically because of sexual dimorphism. Such is the case of this amazing cardinal who presents a bilateral asymmetry. Simply amazing.
This cardinal is a perfect mixture of female cells, with ZW chromosomes, and male cells, with ZZ chromosomes (in birds, unlike in humans, it is the female W chromosome that determines sex). Both sexes are present in the same organism, and therefore exposed to the same hormones, so the cells seem to respond to
"the different levels of sexual expression of the chromosomes in male and female cells", and not to hormonal orders.
Bilateral gynandromorphism has also been observed in butterflies, crustaceans and other birds, and Peer said there has been at least one more published account of a bilateral gynandromorph cardinal, but his plumage was the other way around, male to the right and female to the left. Strange, isn't it?
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Incredble birds)
Colourful article, nice photos.