A Gender-Bender Colored Cardinal : Discovery News - http://news.discovery.com/animals...
May 31, 2011
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liked this
"Fans of the baseball Cardinals might have thought the bird Larry Ammann observed in January was dressed for a home game and an away game at the same time. The cardinal was half red, and half gray. Normally male cardinals are a bright, flashy red. Their fancy feathers may help them stand out and attract the more modestly dressed females. Females are usually a mixture of gray, light-brown and red. But the cardinal Ammann saw was male-colored on the left, but female-colored on the right. The bird also sported a crest on its head usually reserved for males."
- Jenny
"Ammann, a statistics professor at the University of Texas in Dallas, spotted the bird at his backyard feeder one morning, and was puzzled, because he only saw the gray side, but also noted the bright red crest.
“Intrigued, I continued to watch until she turned around so I could see her other side. Suddenly, what originally seemed to be a female cardinal now looked just like a male!” said Ammann in his first hand account.
He rushed to grab his camera to document the confusingly colored cardinal. The complete collection of photos, along with other avian art and brilliantly colored satellite imagery, can be seen at Remote Sensing Art.
After snapping a single shot, the cardinal flew away. But that was all the evidence Ammann needed to start solving this mystery of the two-tone cardinal.
“In just a few hours I learned, in a reply to one of my web queries, that this bird is an extremely rare bilateral gynandromorph cardinal,” Ammann said."
- Jenny
Speaking of gynandromorphs...
- Jenny
Oh that reminded me of this old NPR story: http://www.npr.org/templat...
- rowlikeagirl
Thanks for the link, Audrea; very cool!
- Jenny
These are so bizarre! Wonder why there aren't any humans like this? Or are there?
- rowlikeagirl
From the livescience.com article on this: "For many animals, sex is determined by two chromosomes, called sex chromosomes. Among humans, for example, men have an X and a Y chromosome, while women have two Xs. Every cell in your body, except for sperm or egg cells, carries two sex chromosomes. But among mammals, like us, the Y chromosome carries a gene responsible for the development of testes, which release hormones that promote the development of male features. In women, the ovaries release different hormones that promote the traits we associate with being a female.
The hormones are key to sex identity in humans and other mammals. In fact the dominant hormones can overwrite an abnormality in the sex chromosomes — that is one reason we don't see gynandromorph humans. (Because of the influence of hormones, which diffuse throughout the body, one human can't end up with distinct male and female halves. A number of other disorders in sexual development can occur among humans, such as when external and internal sex organs don't match up or when someone possesses both male and female genitalia.) "
- Spidra Webster
Thanks, Spidra! So fascinating.
- rowlikeagirl