FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JUNE 1995 {opr © by 1994 by Jonata Weir nite i ‘Repeat Naat Aaron ty B Rosemary Ga ad Petr R- Cr) by Rober Hie Set, Vt ta. fereap cpi © ro by she AAAS Reed by prmisoen of Seed the a Danwis out hou he Cal The Ui ‘ee, frtn, 1 og © Dien Ses ‘Be te By Ces ipsChapter 5 A Special Providence there's a special providence in the fll ofa sparrow, —Wituiam Suakespeans, Hamlet perfection cannot be exaggerated, = CHaniés Danwin, ‘Natal Selection Before he leaves Daphne's nn, Peter Grant stoops and scans the dire by the path floppy-brimmed sun hat and gray beard he looks both cheerful and grave, reading the dust. He ing for a ap spines, this mericarp has been chipped open at one end. Within the broken place, Peter can sce ‘pwo dark pod holes, side by side, like tiny eye sockets, both empty “Just-two seeds taken out.” he says new ground, one of them will sometimes ig tock and roll over another rock with its ighed less than 30 grams was once seen rolling over a rock that weighed almost 400. That is ike a man rolling a b der that weighs one ton. It is the labor of Sisyphus phus, Darwin’ finches cannot keep it up forever. down the horny sheaths of their beaks. Some of them have scraped feathered crowns almost bald. Their occas sure like the object in Peter's palm, island, they never saw the nse. Those were good years for Der- indred Joris on Daphne Major. Nine oitt of ten jin December, just before the next rains came. ‘There were also about three hundred cactus finches on the is- land that first April, and nineteen out of twenty of them survived the dy season and made it through to December. ‘Their fourth year, in 1976, was especially wet and green. There ‘were great bouts of rain in January and February, and light showers in April and May, a total of 137 millimeters of rain, which is a good year for Darwin’ finches The fifth year of the study, 1977, began well too. Rain fell right ‘on schedule in the first week of January. Within days, green leaves un- folded and flower buds opened all over Daphne Major, with here and there a few caterpillars crawling on the buds, fast food for Darwin's es. There were more chan one thousand fortit and almost three: Jhundred cactus finches on the island, By this fisst pair of colleagues in the islands, Ian and Lynette Abbott, had gone back to Australia, and Jamie Smith had gone back to Canada, The Daphne warch had been taken over by Pe- ter Boag and Laurene Ratcliffe, Boag was eager for the island’s forts to start laying eggs, because he needed more parents and offipring for his study, He had also received special permission from the staf of the Na~72 EVOLUTION IN THE FLESH tional Park Service of Ecuador to pesform his eng-switching experi- hatched, he was planning to band the foster ith, depth, sd. (Cactos fallen, perhaps because they ‘make most of their living from cactus) The birds nid their eggs in ney built in the cactus trees, and the eggs hatched fine. Fonts do not breed until litle moze rain has fallen. Peter and Laurene waited for the next good dloudburst, the one that would trig ger the forts to mate, But after the first week of January the sky above Daphne Major was like the sky that hangs over the Granss this morn- ing, gray, low, and gloomily quiet. There was one more shower, a very of the volcano as if pouring off a roof, and crickled away into the sea. Whatever was left wae baked away by the dried in che sea breezes on the rim and in the eddying winds that circle within the great bowl of the crater, stirred as if by a fire in the crater bowl each ‘morning, as the rising sun be 1e kava, eter and Laurene checked on the nests when the cactus finch ‘were seven days old, Cactus finches build domed nests deep i je the cactus bushes, where chey are well procected from owls. The ‘chicks were peeping away with as much energy as they do every year. Peter and Laurene reached fied the chicks out, set them down in a hat, and measured them one by one. In a normal ‘year, fies and moths would have been fiting around the cactus trees by now, and che chicks’ mothers and fathers would bave been bringing bugs to the chicks. The air should have been so thick with bugs that sweeps of a net through the air would come up with hundreds. atthe end of that with only a couple of When Boag and Ratcliffe sampled the cont crops with an eyedropper they saw that most were alm le pollen, a few bits of flowers, or a seed kernel, sometimes a smal spider. ‘All over Daphne, leaves shriveled, flowers wilted. Boag and A Special Providence 93 had their fedglings From the upper rim of the cratcr, Boag watched the he wind usually comes fic south, and ir is blocked by larger and ind of Santa Cruz, which lies 8 kilometers to the ‘windward of Daphne Major. Storms drop most of their rain on the all of Daphne Major, lies in a rain shadow. Boag could see regulat downpours along the coast of Santa Cruz. The island of Santiago, 30 Kilometers to the northwest, where Darwin soaked too that spring, "We panted, drank water, and read books,” I on a few scattered days, 24 millimeters his was nor enough to move the fortis to pair off and and it was not enough to fill the air joths and flies. Two Of the cactus finches’ chicks died in the nest, and those did make it out stayed close to their parents for ewice yme of them for more than a month. They hopped and fathers and begged with piercing cries and much shaking of their wings. During the previous June, when the ishnd was wet and green, there had been more than 10 grams of seeds in an average square ‘meter of liva. The finches had already eaten their way through many fof those seeds during the dry season of 1976, Even if the rains had fallen a5 late as March or April of 1977 the seed supply would soon have rebounded, and the pair off and breed But the weeks went by, and the rains did not come, and the bitds did not pair off. Day after day they ‘went on pecking over the same square meters for the same diminish- ing supply of seeds. By Jun year there were only 6 grams of seeds per square meter. By December there would be only 3 grams. ‘As they always do in dry times, the birds went on looking for the4 EVOLUTION IN THE FLESH easiest seeds, But now they were sharing the last of the last of the pis ‘They were down to the bottom of the bowl. In June of the previous year, four out of five seeds that a finch picked up were wn 1 on the Struggle Index. Bat as the small, soft, ium and other plants disappeared, the rating peaking above 6. The birds were forced to ted, gummy, and sticky ubbed off afterward as the birds raked the cinders and gravel looking for more seeds. Their bare scalps ‘were exposed to the sun all day. Boag and Ratcliffe began to find litle bald finches lying dead on the lava ‘They kept up the routine of capturing and measuring finches, angling them in the weighing eup and recording the numbers in their sraterproof notebooks (that year they did not need them to be water- proof). By June, many of weights were down as much a5 a rer from the June before. A large number of these finches had . although by now they badly needed a new set of feath- their contour feathers were so worn that the down un derneath was exposed, a8 Boag would report later in his now-famous and Laurene found dead fortis lying hheveled they looked as if they had been combed the wrong way, The fraying of feathers was hardest on the smallest species, the fidiginsa, which when not eating the small, soft ‘A Special Providence. 75 seeds of Chamacsyee were poking about for bugs in the lichen on the torchwiood trees, Boag says, or hawking for bugs from a naked branch. They needed all their contour feathers for flight. Even in good years, finch watchers have co be carefil never to leave a bucket of water staiiding of vill jamp in and drown, 2° F). Even where there ing out in the open, the heat was keeping the finches ig there between the hows of 11 a.m. and 3 pam. Meas while at night Peter and Laurene would be shivering in their tent if jown to 73° B because their bodies were so used to the heat. Boay lay avake and wondered hovr his flocks were doing, 4 biblical shepherds once did in a fardistane desert: “In the day drought consumed me, and the frost by night” Now and then a frigstebid harried a blue-footed booby out of is kill of fish. Ifthe fish dropped on the island, as many as ten or swenty finches would flock around it. They ako scavenged broken eggs and fiesh booby guano, They lung close when the boobies fed their young and fought forthe fish scr theic kill, finches fought over th In other years the finches had ignored the lava lizards that seutile about the rocks. But once that year, Peter and Lauene saw 2 female cactus finch eating 2 black lizand wail, and nearby they spotted a f= ‘male lizard with a freshly broken stump. Some days later, they saw the same bind chase affer another female lava lizard, pecking at is tl76 BVOLUTION IN THE FLESH. She might have new entry on the finch menn—bur chat was the end of the episode. Another time they saw a blue-footed booby wounded by a frigatebird. A fortis stood beneath the wounded booby and drank the blood 2s it dripped on 2 rock. fe just sat there, month after month,” Boag says. “At the time, ‘we were depressed. We were losing the breeding season, so we il these birds were disappearing. We kept up doing the cae cchecks and censuses, But our feeling was na fone might conclude seawene papers, be the moderate despair of doing a research project and seeing you fledgi To got a large enough hhad to measure many bun= 1 year only a faction that bred would build a nest that he and Laurens would find, He ‘would band all of the nestlings he found, and about half of chose would die. He might measure nwo thousand birds, and he might end A Special Providence ‘up with only one hundred of their offipring. ““They'e very precious birds, if you see what | mean,” he says now. “Each dead bi . Twas not thinking of ea bind at data point fr selaton, Tas thinking for herit ‘When he and Laurene went back in January 1978, they w: the bright yellow flowers of the cact land, as they do at the turn of each yea verged on the blossoms, gorging themselves on che pol drinking the nectar, Boag and Ratcliffe did the usual census. They found fewer than two hundred find fon the island. Just one fi the drought. They measured these s uunmified carcasses of the dead he effects of the drough: ‘March 1976, when the island of Daphne Major was still green and lush. They end in Detember 1977, when the cactus flowered and the worst of the drought was over. All through the drought the total mass of seeds on the island went down, down, down, The average size and hardnes! of the remaining. seeds went up, up, up. The total number of finches on the is with the food supply: 1,400 in March 1076, 1,309 in January 197 fewer than 300 in December. Next they take the finches species by species. At the stact of 1977 there were about 1200 fortis on Daphne. By the end of the year there ‘were 180, 2 loss of 85 percent. ‘Ac the start of the year there were exactly 280 cactus finches on the island, By the end of it chere were 110, a loss of 60 percent. Of the smallest ground finches, filiginasa, there were a dozen on the island at the star of 1977, and only one of them’ survived the year ‘They also plot the age of the survivors. Many of the survivors ‘were the oldest birds on the island, and had been banded by the Grant team in 1973, Not a single fortis was born that year om the island, and78 EVOLUTION IN THE FLESH ‘only a single one of the fortis that had been born the year before sur- vived the drought. Only one of the young cactus finches born the year before survived. The drought practically wiped out the cohort that vias born the year before that too. That generation became rare, and rarer with each passing year, like steel pennies minted in ins of the finches thar made it through the drought and the finches that did not. ‘Among fortis, they already knew that the biggest birds with the deepest beaks had the best equi ited up the 1en big tough seeds were all a bied could find, these big- ‘erage forts beak before the dro 9.42 deep. The average beak of the fo and 9.96 deep. Variations too small to see with helped make the difference between life and death. of God grind exceeding small, Not only had they seen natural selection in action. It was the most selection ever documented in nature. One result was a bizarre tilt of the sex ratios on the island. At the stare of ere were about Goo males and Goo fernales. By the end mately bigger beaks, so the males generally had an edge. ‘words, among the males the biggest survived, and among females the biggest survived, but many more males survived than fe- males, And what made the difference between life and death was often “the slightest variation,” an imperceptible difference in the size of the beak, just as Darwin’ theory predies. Many people—even even coday—find the power of A Special Providence 79 fimeter really mat “Well, thats the fact? I said, "Watch my data and then ask quet- tions! And he asked no question “None,” Rosemary agrees. “And he sat there scowling, fidgeting and talking the whole NATURAL SELECTION BY ITSELF is not evolution. It i only “I breed many, and hang many” ‘But the fine nary change. They only knew that, according, ince the beak variations are heritable: the be passed on to the next, becoming muffled and compressed or streched and warped, over the years, as they pass down the line of the generations and onward into the foture, ‘This'is a step the founders of Darwinian theory considered logi- cally inevitable, but which many of these who eame after Darwin have doubted, Raymond Pearl again: “In the minds of an astonishingly large number of people, which number includes some rather great thing to show so. Ifthe ‘On January 9, 1978, the clouds mained at last on Day Mose than so millimeters fll that day. The rain fell on nothing green, ‘only rocks and dead-looking trees and withered weeds. The rain streamed down the sides of the mountainBYOLUTION IN THE FLESH [All over the island, che male finches, the drough¢® survivors, did 1 in the first bout of rain. They flew to the to the crown ofa tree that rises from ceeple of a cae famous beak, like a rooster in a barnyard in the fits light of day, began singing in the rain, "The rain transformed the island, Within a week there were leaves and flowers on the torchwood. Green stems shot up before the finch watchers’ eyes. “Meremia seedlings were 5 centimeters tall,” Peter green fr igs. From the sea the [Not 2 single pair of finches on the island had survived intact. The least one member of every couple, But les’ beaks began rurning dark brown, and the males’ beaks turned black, signs that the birds were ready 10. tests in the cactus and sang for days on end from ey ovined. The ferales hopped from territory ‘could win a female. ‘The males flew afier the females that visited their territories in what the finch watchers call the “sex chase” The females hopped around and flew around to visit nest after nest, and took pate in chase aer chase, before one by one they each settled down with a single male, ‘Again the finch watchers watched and measured. They found that the females had picked were not a random sample, any more than the ones the drought had spared were a random sample. The suc- cessful males tended to be the largest of the large. They were the mal with the very blackest, most mature plumage and the ones with deepest beaks. iim ee] A Special Providence 84 Because of the crazy sex ratio, most of the males were left 0 sly a very small subsample Of the eligible females was able to pair off. One female the island, breeding five times and produe- Now it became of great significance that variations of body and beak are passed on from one generation to the next with fidebity. As a result, the males’ unequal hick in love helped to perpetuate the ef- ‘drought. The male and female fortis that survived in 1978 were already significantly bigger birds than the average jot: had been before the drought. Of this group the males that became fathers were bigger than the rest. And the young birds that hatched and grew up that year turned out to be big too, and their beaks were deep. The av- vas 4 oF § percent deeper than 1s before the drought, the drought of 1977 the Finch Unit had seen natu as of the birds’ beaks and in many other dimens Alter that, che watchers on Dapht d to keep watching. ‘They had to keep coming back, Not onl tion among, Darwin supposed possible. The finch watchers had to find out what ‘would happen next. Bat even if they had quit there, what they had Major fiom 1973 through 1978 would be enough t father embarrasing lacuna in Darwinism. In 1909, at the c Darwin’ birch, during a scientific meeting at Cambridge University the German bi really exphin| first small steps of evolutionary change. has been for many years a con- cart only reply: "W& must as- vineed adherent of the sume 0, but we cannot pr Several human gen hhave to assume. They One of Peter Grant’ graduate students, Trevor shose early years using povte in the 19708. These tools allow investigators to disentangle which among all the changing features of a bird or a fish or a fern is most82. EVOLUTION IN THE FLESH strongly selected duting a elective episode. That i, vyestigators which changes in the living form were ess ‘were simply following along, which parts of a living form’ were the targets of selection, This technique (itis known as partial regression, analysis) was developed in 1983 by the evolutionary theorists. Russ Lande and Steve Arnold. As soon as Lande and Arnold published the technique, Price applied i to Boag drought. This reanalysis brought the evolutionary event into even sharper focus. Price knew that the survivors and their offipring were larger in ‘weight, wing length, tarsus length, and also in beak width, However, partial regression analysis shows t ‘were selected by the droughe with equal emphasis. During that terrible drought on Daphne Major, among fortis, nature was selecting most powerfully for bigger body size and deeper beaks. Nature was not se= lecting for longer beaks; a fois with 2 long beak had no special advan~ tage in the drought. And nature was rejecting the birds with wider beaks. So it was big binds with deep but relatively narrow beaks that ‘were favored: perhaps, Peter Grant writes; "because 2 narrow yet deep bill was th nstrument for performing the difficult task of tearing, twisting, and biting the mericarps of So the birds were not simply magnified by the drought: they were ied..‘They were changed by their dead. Their beaks 10s, af ifa shutter has cxeaked open that should have been dow world beyond our world, 4 place we sobs in the dey falls, end the next generation builds on she ri drought bears fruit. Even death is 2 seed,