YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Prum

lines on the record: 61
first: 2021-06-30
most recent: 2021-06-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, well, dueting is still highly concentrated in just a few groups, songbirds and a few other lineages. So there's a lot of things like gulls and penguins and shorebirds that don't have”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, a lot of explanation in biology is historical explanation. So I don't think that comes out in a regression line. One of the things we see is, again, social complexity in tropical birds, you're much more likely to have pairs that endure for the whole year, right? And resident on a territory, that kind of long-term social relationship will support duetting.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure as are taking over Borneo, I can tell you where you go to Southeast Asia. There are forests where there are incredibly diverse gliding mammals of multiple families, right? So that's probably because the forest is made mostly of dipterocarps, which look like really, really high broccoli, you know, 30 meters high. And so there's a lot of space. And why are they flying or why are they gliding? Well, to get away from predators, or even ultimately they get good enough at it that they can use it to disperse from tree to tree. So the idea is that that's how it started. Of course, maybe one of the reasons why Flank Squirrels haven't taken over the world is because they never got to powered flag like birds did, which obviously is going a lot further.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Birds are dinosaurs, feathers of all four, thermoregulation, or for something other than flight, and that flight arose or evolved from the ground. And it turns out that the dino people were correct. Feathers did not evolve for flight, and birds are dinosaurs. But it turns out that column A was actually right about flight. Flight most likely evolved from the trees down. And there's a whole bunch of reasons why. Starting with gliding like a flank squirrel and then controlling your gliding and then using those controlled movements to create a flight stroke.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deep controversy there. There are lots of careers that have been thrown on the pyre of avian flight origins in detail. There are two theories. One is the ground up cursorial theory, that somehow you're running and you're running fast enough and you start with maybe movements that help you manipulate as you run and then finally take off the ground. And the other is the arboreal theory or the trees down that you start with gliding and control movements of gliding and then eventually to powered flight. Those folks have been warring at it for almost a century, but really, really going at it for the last few decades. And so where does this sit now? The interesting thing is that it used to be that the origin of birds was like a menu where you had column A or column B. And column A was birds are not related dinosaurs. Feathers evolved for flight and flight evolved from the trees down. And then the opposite was birds or dinosaurs and columns.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's really cool thing. Actually, if you go back to the gate of a crocodile or any tetrapod, the front legs and the hind legs were really coupled. You have to do that well. But going back probably in the very long bipedal theropod dinosaurs, long history of bipedality and theropod dinosaurs, those things had to be uncoupled. And it required a lot of rewiring, both of the motor movement, the brain, the muscles, et cetera. So that's ancient in the lineage of birds. Think of T-Rex with its tiny little forelimbs, very decoupled. And then what birds have done in flight is actually to couple the forelimbs with the tail in flight. So we have a part of the axial skeleton, right, which now becomes, in a way, related to the flight apparatus, which are the forelimbs, right? The front of the wings. Basically, it turns out to be deep dynobiology that birds are just taking advantage of in flight.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sure. Rainfall is unpredictable. And also the other combination is the habitat is saturated, right? So there aren't a lot of places to go. So what that means is that it's often more helpful or more useful for individuals to delay dispersal until their reproductive age. And then they're hanging out. And then, of course, they do work. How they benefit could be both helping their relatives, kin selection, or they could be gaining experience, direct benefits like learning how to raise a family before they get a chance to do their own.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are two cool things about it. One is that, yes, and people have associated cooperative breeding, the special variation in the avian family life where you get cooperative behavior among reproductive age individuals with unpredictable rainfall. So that's a general phenomenon you find it a lot in different parts of the world.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The basement and help their parents until they can inherit the back 40 or take over a butt off, if you will, into a new territory. So that means there's a lot of reproductive opportunities between groups, but the groups are in separate territories. What happens in these cooperative species like fairy rents? People found out is that the females mate multiply. That is, they can mate with other members of the group besides the mature or most dominant male, or they can mate with other males in other groups.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We need to talk a little bit about what makes Frey Wren's extraordinary in other ways. Frey Wrens live in cooperative groups, extended families that include multiple males and females of reproductive age. Usually a large number of them are the at least male offspring of previous years that are hanging around helping mom and dad or some adults raise their relatives. This probably arises and it's very common in Australian birds. It probably arises because of very high habitat variability, in particular variability in rainfall. As you see already, thinking about Australia, we think a lot about, you know, a drought or not, right? So under those conditions, you never really know whether you're going to have enough resources to raise kids. Another feature is that the habitat is rich, and sometimes of the year. And so as a result, they're kind of pack-cheek to joul. So there's no real estate for the kids to go off to. So they stay at home moving.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow, I don't think that there probably is an extraordinary amount of infidelity in Australian birds. However, there are certainly a number of classic cases of multiple mating in Australian birds, or the classic case being the fairy wrens, which have a very weird social system including one feature, which is multiple mating.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source