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Bird Coloration

Auk, The, Jul 2007 by Brush, Alan H

Bird Coloration.-Geoffery E. Hill and Kevin J. McGraw, Editors. 2006. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Vol. 1, Mechanisms and Measurements: ix + 589 pp., 32 color plates; ISBN 0-674-01893-1. Vol. 2, Function and Evolution: x + 477 pp., 32 color plates; ISBN 0-674-02176-2. Hardbound, $95.00 each.-In his now classic Animal Biochromes and Structural Colours (1953), Denis Fox surveyed the "physical, chemical, distributional & physiological features of coloured bodies in the animal world" in only 378 pages. A second edition (1976) expanded to 433 pages was considered equally comprehensive, scholarly, and complete. In 2006, just about a half century after Fox, Hill and McGraw require two volumes of 1,066 total pages, 23 authors, and 64 color plates just to survey birds! This is an important and timely contribution. Times have certainly changed, and it has all been for the good. By necessity, much of the work that Fox's volume covered was done by a group of German workers beginning with Otto Völker and lasting to the start of World War II. Fox, trained in England but working at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, studied fish, invertebrates, and birds into the early 1960s. His work on flamingos, in particular, set the stage for young ornithologists' tentative ventures into feather pigment chemistry. The field began slowly, with the development of extraction techniques gentle enough to preserve the easily destroyed "lipochrome" pigments, separation on thin-layer chromatography, and measuring optical densities on primitive Beckman DB Spectrophotometers. It is astonishing, therefore, to follow Robert Montgomerie's (volume 1, chapter 2) masterful romp through contemporary techniques and theory for measuring and quantifying colors in birds.

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By the last decades of the 20th century, there was an explosion in the understanding of avian color perception, techniques to measure and analyze reflected light, the chemistry and physiology of pigments, and new and valuable insights into the basis and nature of structural colors. There have been dramatic technical advances in electron microscopy, and sophisticated tools to separate and identify pigments of just about every type (although there are some feather pigments still to be identified) and exploration of the role of plumage in behavior. The argument that the world of color for birds is different from ours is soundly made. All this and more is covered in these two volumes, which reflect the progress and growth in the field.

With a body of knowledge of this magnitude, the reader may want to tease out information relevant to a particular question or subfield. It is all here. Topics range from the plumagepigment biosynthetic pathways to how they are absorbed, transported, and transferred across compartments. The consequences of dietary selectivity, seasonal metabolic changes, and their connection to the molt cycle, through the genetic input into the control of plumage patterns, and environmental factors that affect their display are all represented. Higher-level issues, such as the mechanisms of color perception, the determination of feather patterns, feather-tract specificity, and pigment content, are addressed. Further, the roles of colors in signaling such features as dominance or sexual selection or a dozen other functions are discussed. The list continues, and the chapter authors can be credited with taking a long view of the problem addressed. Consequently, the book makes major contributions to numerous aspects of avian biology. It is well edited, with blanket coverage of the relevant literature. I noticed typos mostly in the references. Readers will delight to find authorities writing in areas and on material they know best.

Without doubt, this book is a milestone. All the contributions are relevant and all the authors conversant with their fields. I found several chapters to be extraordinarily stimulating and informative, because they either deal with a particularly knotty problem or represent major advances in the field. This is not to demean any of the other contributions. In one example, Gary Bortolotti (volume 2, chapter 1) grapples with one of the most diffuse aspects: natural selection and coloration. In a second, Alex Badyaev makes a masterful presentation of a new evolutionary synthesis of color displays (volume 2, chapter 8). Other authors explore, often at one or more levels, the plumage, its patterns, the ecological interactions, and mechanisms of its development and evolution.

I was especially impressed with Richard Prum's review of his recent work on the nature of structural colors (volume 1, chapter 7). He carefully illustrates and separates pigment and structural colors, and then introduces a clear description of coherent light scattering as the basis for structural colors. This is a problem that has gone unsettled for years. The persistence of the problem is reflected in the names for the phenomena, which include Tyndall and Rayleigh scattering (both late-19th-century optical physicists). Prum goes on to describe a new approach to the analysis of nanostructure-based colors using Fourier Transforms. Both iridescent feathers and vividly colored skin are discussed. The physical basis for his arguments resides in the β-keratin-melanin-air space known as the melanosome. The analysis has been enhanced by advances in both electron microscopy and high-speed computing. The yield is a comprehensive understanding of the structural colors of feather barbs, skin, and eyes.

Bird Coloration

Auk, The, Jul 2007 by Brush, Alan H

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