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The Genetic Mechanisms Underlying Pigmentation And Their Evolutionary Importance In Birds, Nicholas David Sly

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Integumentary pigmentation is a phenotype of fundamental importance to animals, with major impacts on survival and fitness. Thus, understanding the mechanisms underlying pigmentation can help illuminate general principles about how adaptive variation is generated and maintained in populations. Here, I present a dissertation that is aimed at understanding the developmental, regulatory, and genetic mechanisms that underlie variation in avian plumage color, and their evolutionary importance.

In my first chapter, I addressed how the modular organization of plumage traits may impact their evolution. The production of color in developing feathers is a modular process, with several mechanisms combining to produce the …