2025/10/20 by Teresa M. Pegan, Vera Ting, Brett W. Benz +1 · 1 voice
Environmental Science · Mathematics · #Avian ecology and behavior #Morphological variations and asymmetry
paper · doi:10.1086/739176
), to deconstruct variation in the individual skeletal and feather components of the hand-wing. Our results reveal that the relatively pointed wing shape of migrants is a consequence of shorter secondary feathers (i.e., a narrower wing) compared with nonmigrants, rather than longer wings. Indeed, despite having more pointed wings, migratory populations have similar wing length (i.e., wing chord) as sedentary continental populations. These populations show similar trunk size, but migrants have significantly shorter limb bones. Our results reveal the morphological underpinnings of a wing shape metric that has been widely used in macroevolutionary and macroecological studies of avian dispersal.