Natalia Pérez-Amaya

Century-long shifts in body size and proportions of lowland rainforest birds - Evolutionary Ecology Evolutionary Ecology - Climate change is having profound impacts on biodiversity, with notable effects on the distribution, and morphology of species. Many studies have documented changes in body...

📖 doi.org/10.1007/s106...
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🔬 I led this research as a doctoral student at @UNALoficial, together with a great team of collaborators in Colombia and the US. This work shows that museum collections are time machines — letting us track how species change through time.

🌍 Most bird research focuses on temperate regions — yet tropical forests hold 70% of the world’s bird diversity. This study shows that even "buffered" rainforests experience complex morphological responses to environmental change.

🌡️ Human-induced disturbances aren’t just changing temperatures and rainfall, or driving extinctions and invasions — they may also be quietly reshaping the bodies of the species that survive in these altered landscapes.

🧐 While exact developmental or ecological mechanisms remain unclear, smaller bodies may shed heat better, and longer tails improve maneuverability in dense forests.

📊- Hummingbirds: mostly smaller (strong evidence in 1 species)
- Other birds: mostly larger (strong evidence in 3 species)
- Tails: 4.4% longer (61% of species)
- Bills: deeper in 43% of species

🔍 The detective work: I meticulously measured museum specimens from the 1912 and 2021 expeditions — 23 forest-resident species, 9 morphological traits, repeated measurements, thousands of data points. The result? A century-long window into how birds are reshaping before our eyes.

⏰ In 1912, an AMNH expedition collected birds in Barbacoas, SW Colombia. In 2021, we followed their century-old trail back into the same forest (still >90% intact). This created a rare 109-year natural experiment to reveal how birds respond to environmental change.

💥BREAKING: Birds in a tropical pluvial rainforest of the Chocó have been quietly changing in morphology for 109 years. Some have shrunk, others grown. Tails grew longer, bills grew deeper. Even in forests with continuous cover, climate change may be rewriting evolution in real time.

Algunas aves de Colombia tienen la cola más larga por el cambio climático Un grupo de investigadores viajó al sur del país para comprender cómo las aves estaban cambiando debido al calentamiento global.

Nuestra investigación sobre cambios morfológicos en las aves de Barbacoas, Nariño en Colombia! www.elespectador.com/ambiente/alg...

ecoevojobs.net 2025-26

UPDATE: The 2025-2026 list of faculty and postdoc positions in ecology and evolutionary biology is out! Be sure to check out this active and helpful community run resources! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...