Professors make annual trip to study Galapagos finches' beaks
Peter and Rosemary Grant would fare well on "Survivor."Living alone on a small, uninhabited island, communicating with the mainland only by radio and relying on a national park service's monthly delivery of drinking water have become second nature for this husband-and-wife research team.Since 1973, the University ecology and evolutionary biology professors have made a yearly trip to Daphne Major in the Galapagos Islands, staying anywhere from six weeks to six months each time.Part of the archipelago originally made famous by Charles Darwin, Daphne Major provided the Grants an ideal location for tracking evolutionary patterns in native animal populations.With the help of the Darwin Research Station and the Galapagos National Parks authority, they gathered data with relatively few obstacles or interruptions.Their resulting study, recently published in the journal Science, is "one of the true classics of evolutionary biology," John Burke, an Indiana University professor, said in the article.Over three decades, the Grants focused their study on two indigenous species, the cactus finch and the ground finch."They were already famous in evolutionary biology before we started our work, and they seemed to us the most suitable group of birds for our ecological and evolutionary studies," Peter Grant said in an e-mail from Switzerland.They found that the average beak size of the ground finch changed slightly according to food availability.In 1977, a major drought hit the island, and many small-seeded plants were killed.