A simple intervention can help Galapagos finches to stave off an insidious parasite. Offered insecticide-soaked cotton, birds from four finch species wove it into their nests and effectively stamped out an invasive nest fly, researchers
A simple intervention can help Galapagos finches to stave off an insidious parasite. Offered insecticide-soaked cotton, birds from four finch species wove it into their nests and effectively stamped out an invasive nest fly, researchers report today in Current Biology. The fly Philornis downsi represents a serious threat to the iconic birds, whose speciation patterns were key to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Its larvae feed on blood from newly-hatched finches and have been known to kill all a year's nestlings at a given field site.
The larvae were found to be killing off nestlings in Ecuador's Galapagos Islands in the 1990s, spurring conservation ecologists and others to seek a way to eliminate the flies without harming the birds. Now, with funding scarce and the finch population declining, it turns out that the answer might b