Blood feeding in the vampire finch

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The Vampire Finch (Geospiza difficilis septentrionalis) is a subspecies of the Sharp-beaked Ground Finch that occurs on the two smallest, most remote islands in the Galápagos Islands. On Wolf and Darwin Islands, the subspecies has evolved a unique foraging strategy: it pierces the skin of larger seabirds and drinks their blood. Blood feeding is exceedingly rare among birds, and even in groups like arthropods that exhibit blood feeding, it has evolved relatively infrequently, suggesting that specialized adaptations are required to allow the organism to exploit this atypical food resource. I am currently planning a project aimed at a comprehensive understanding of how and why this extreme behavior evolved in the vampire finch. I will use a combination of behavioral and ecological field studies to explore the environmental conditions that promote this behavior. In addition, I will use cutting-edge transcriptomics and proteomics to analyze gene expression and protein production in the digestive system of these birds, with the aim of discovering whether they exhibit physiological adaptations to blood feeding similar to well studied species such as mosquitoes, ticks, and vampire bats. Using a multi-faceted approach, I hope to uncover the selective pressures and behavioral and physiological mechanisms that promoted this strange example of adaptation in the wild. Stay tuned as the story of the vampire finch unfolds!
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The Galápagos Islands. The Sharp-beaked Ground Finch occurs on all the islands marked with a bird icon. The blood-feeding subspecies (i.e., the Vampire Finch) occurs only on the tiny remote islands of Darwin and Wolf. I plan to compare their physiology, genetics, and behavior to non-blood-feeding populations on Pinta and Genovesa.