Birds that bury their eggs: How megapodes’ nesting behavior evolved

Australian Brush-turkey chick shortly after hatching and emerging
from incubation mound and showing well-developed flight feathers.
Photo: Burke Museum.

By Sharon Birks

Did you know that not all birds sit on their eggs to incubate them? Megapodes (family Megapodiidae)—a fascinating group of birds named for their large feet—cleverly harness environmental heat sources to incubate their eggs.

Depending on the species and location, megapodes may lay their eggs in burrows dug in sun-warmed beaches or geothermally active areas, or they may build large incubation mounds that function like compost piles and generate heat through decomposition.

Although most megapodes look like distant chicken relatives (they are), their unique incubation behavior has driven a suite of unusual adaptations, including:

• large feet to help them dig burrows or build mounds; 
• thin, porous egg shells to help eggs “breathe” underground; and
• the ability for chicks to dig themselves out from under several feet of soil after hatching and emerge ready to fly and fend for themselves.

How did this odd incubation behavior evolve?

New Curator of Genetic Resources and Herpetology Arrives!

At the beginning of this month the Burke Museum welcomed a new curator of genetic resources and herpetology to the museum, Adam Leaché. Adam first visited the Pacific Northwest in 1997 as a graduate student, when he attended his first major academic conference – the annual meeting of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists – at the University of Washington. Over a decade later, he returns to Seattle with a brand new curatorial position at the Burke Museum and a joint appointment as an assistant professor of biology at the University of Washington.

New Burke curator of genetic resource and herpetology, Adam Leaché, poses with a Komodo dragon.

Dr. Leaché will oversee both the genetic resources collection and the herpetology collection (reptiles and amphibians) at the Burke Museum. He is already planning several collecting trips for the museum, including field trips to West Africa, Mexico, and the deserts of the American Southwest. Dr. Leaché is also particularly interested in expanding the catalogue of specimens collected in the National Parks of Washington State.

In addition to focusing on the growth of the genetic resource and herpetology collections, Dr. Leaché is enthusiastic about developing public outreach programs for the Burke. One of his hopes for his new position is to help bring funding to the museum for the development of exhibits and educational content about ecology and evolution studies.

Dr. Leaché’s own research is focused on systematics, phylogenetics, phylogeography, population genetics, and species delimitation. Over the last ten years, he developed an integrative research program exploring the evolution of North American fence lizards and horned lizards that has resulted in publications across a number of disciplines. During the winter quarter, Dr. Leaché will be teaching an applied phylogenetics course at the UW – a lab course that gives biology students the computational and bioinformatics skills necessary to organize and analyze genetic data.

The Burke is excited to have Adam Leaché on board!

Making Collections-Based Research More Accessible

An exciting new development is now available on the Burke Museum’s Web site: the Burke Museum Publications Database is a new online tool that makes collections-based research at the museum more accessible to all!

This new Web page presents the different ways Burke Museum collections are used for published research. Not only do Burke professionals conduct their own research, but the museum also collaborates with other researchers worldwide by providing access to Burke collections; this research often ends up published in scientific journals for others to access in the future.

The Burke’s Genetic Resources Collection (GRC) Manager Sharon Birks worked with our web team to build a search engine of about 260 publications from the GRC division alone! Most publications have a short summary (abstract), and Sharon also wrote more in-depth introductions to three highlighted publications that experts and novices alike can appreciate. These three highlighted publications on the research from Genetic Resources are posted here.

In the future, other Burke collections divisions will add their publications to the websites as well. So check the pages regularly to read about more exciting findings and watch the database grow!

Posted By: Andrea Barber, Communications