In This Issue - Genetic Study of Endangered Woodpeckers - Honey
and Wild Bee Populations are Threatened - Current Literature
Ancient DNA was recently extracted and sequenced from museum
specimens of endangered Ivory-billed Woodpeckers (collected
between about 80 and 150 years ago in North America and Cuba)
and compared to DNA sequences of the Imperial Woodpecker of
Mexico. The project, recently published in Biology Letters by
National Museum of Natural History scientists Robert Fleischer
and Carla Dove, and their colleagues, began as a simple
barcoding effort to add the Ivory-billed Woodpecker sequence to
the Barcode of Life Database (BoLD), and to test whether a
feather found in 1968 in Florida was really an Ivory-billed
Woodpecker feather, but soon turned into a more interesting
investigation about the evolutionary relationships of the
woodpeckers themselves. Analysis of the DNA sequences from all
three woodpeckers revealed that they form a monophyletic group
relative to other species of their genus. They a