one of my favorite linguistic phenomena is the differentiation between bill and beak when talking about birds.
they both technically mean the same thing but because of the kiki/bouba effect we use different words depending on the shape of the bird.
this is def a bill but this:
thats a beak babey!
also going to use this post as an excuse to talk about the snail kite because their story is SO COOL
(info taken mainly from this article and this website)
so between 2000-2008, Snail Kite populations in florida, USA were decimated, with fewer than 1000 individuals. this was due to the recent invasion and proliferation of This Bastard:
this Slimin Simon is the Channeled Apple Snail. these goopy goobers got to florida and, like many a retiree before them, decided to Start Fucking and Never Stop. this was an issue for the Snail Kite because they started out competing their primary food source, the much smaller Florida Apple Snail. the kites had feet and beaks too small to reliably eat these new snails, and that sucks of you’re named the Snail Kite
at this point, ornithologists agree that this is Not Good for the Snail Kite. however, as they continue to monitor the population over several years, they start to see them rebounding. juveniles are surviving more reliably, and their numbers start growing again.
ornithologists theorised that this was because of natural selection favouring bigger birds with longer bills, and while thats true, its not as straight forward as that.
see, with this quantity of snails now available, once the birds could eat them, there were plenty to go around. this, of course, means that the kites decide its time to Start Fucking and Never Stop, leading to a vast increase in the number of births. researchers noticed that the chicks weren’t increasing in mass and bill length linearly, but that the variance in traits had skyrocketed compared to before the invasion.
essentially, the circumstances that had befallen the humble Snail Kite were the exact fuel for the fire of evolution: an abundance of food/individuals, and a niche to fill. with those two things in hand, evolution surged to adapt the species to its new environment.
now, nearly 20 years later, this raptor has developed a beak significantly longer than at the start of the millennium, increasing by around 1 standard deviation (meaning that the average bill after the invasion was as long as the ~84th percentile before the invasion)
this phenomenon has triggered a warning from environmental scientists and ornithologists as well, warning that introducing invasive species in order to save endangered ones isnt a viable option, and could create a larger environmental hazard than the problem its meant to fix.
if you’ve stuck to the end of this thank you for listening to my bird rant, if you are aware of any factual errors please dont hesitate to check my work!
