The golden-crowned manakin (Lepidothrix vilasboasi) was rediscovered in the Amazon after 45 years, and provides scientists with lots of new information about the species

The Amazon rain forest is one of the major hotspots for biodiversity, and it houses a huge amount of species, including many distinct species of birds. One of the rarest ones is the golden-crowned manakin (Lepidothrix vilasboasi). This bird was first found in Brazil in 1957, but after the initial discovery, no one was able to find more of this bird until an expedition that took place in 2002. This is obviously some time ago, so this is not the fascinating story I want to write about today, but rather about a recently published paper that shows that this is a hybrid species!

This is a picture of the original bird that was used to describe the species back in the 1950s (known as a paratype). Image is posted by Wikimedia Commons users Dysmorodrepanis with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

What a hybrid species is, and why it's cool!

A hybrid is basically a species that is created when two different species mate and produce offspring together. Most species have either internal or external barriers, or both of these barriers to protect offspring from being produced from crossbreeding, but genetically alike species are sometimes able to bypass these barriers.

When the rare occasion happens that two animals of different species create a new offspring, this individual tend to be sterile, so it cannot create more offspring to further its own mixed genes. As an example of this we have the mule, which is made by crossing a horse with a donkey.

What is even more rare is that the offspring is fertile and can continue to breed with other members of the new hybrid species, and this is not something we see every day. We have some captive examples of it, such as ligers/tigons who are made by crossing tigers and lions with each other, but these would not really mate with each other in the wild.

A pair of ligers in a Korean zoo. This species was expected to be infertile, but this was later proven wrong. Image by Hkandy, posted with the GNU Free Documentation License.

However, new research suggest that the golden-crowned manakin is actually a hybrid species, made from an extremely rare natural event.

It's worth to keep in mind that plants are other non-vertebrate organisms are able to hybridize a lot easier, so that's far from as uncommon as it is with vertebrates. As a matter of fact, very many of the plants you have in your garden or inside your house is a hybrid, often created by mixing a very beautiful plant with one that is related to it, but is easier to take care of.

Anyway, hybrid species can inherit traits from either parent, or the unique genetic combination can have unexpected results that lead to a unique morphology.

How the golden-crowned manakin became its own species

According to the recently published research paper, a snow-capped manakin (Lepidothrix nattereri) produced a fertile offspring with a opal-crowned manakin (Lepidothrix iris) about 180,000 years ago. The new hybrid species would then mate with other opal-crowned manakins until a point where around 80 % of the DNA was shared with the opal-crowned manakins, meaning that they stayed close to each other for a few generations. At this point the ice age had made huge rivers that eventually separated the hybrid species from both the different parent species, and these birds were reluctant to cross the river. This is of vital importance for the development of a new species, because this allowed the new hybrid species to breed only among itself for almost 200,000 years! At this point the "new" hybrid species has been isolated for such a long while that it can be considered to be its own unique species, and not a mix of the two parent species anymore.

What is really interesting about this hybrid is that it is much duller than both parent species, who both have stronger colors on their crown in order to attract females in the dark green rain forest. This is a good example of how mixing different genes can really alter the morphology of the offspring, where it did not get enough production of the proteins that were responsible for the bright colors.

Thanks for reading

Thanks for reading about the new discovery that suggest that the golden-crowned manakin is a rare hybrid species. I hope you learned something new, or at least had some fun with the post, and as always feel free to leave any questions below. And to finish with some good news; despite the bird not having been seen for 45 years, it was actually not all that rare when people first figured out where it lived. It is "only" categorized as vulnerable by the IUCN, meaning that it is in danger of becoming threatened with extinction soon, but is still pretty far away from actually going extinct.