What is it about?

The Hawaiian honeycreepers are famous examples of both adaptive radiations and catastrophic extinctions in island birds. Campana and colleagues resolve the relationships between nearly all Hawaiian honeycreeper species that existed when Europeans first arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in 1778. They show that hybridization played a far greater role in the evolution of these iconic birds than previously known. The study links the adaptive radiation to a 1-million-year period following the emergence of the island of Oahu, supporting a model in which Hawaiian honeycreeper lineages evolved by back-and-forth colonization and differentiation on the islands of Kauai and Oahu.

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Why is it important?

This study revises our understanding of the evolution of the iconic Hawaiian honeycreeper adaptive radiation. It also reveals that a greater percentage of the Hawaiian honeycreeper phylogenomic diversity has been lost than previously appreciated.

Perspectives

The findings are bittersweet because while we have a much better understanding of the relationships between the Hawaiian honeycreepers and the role hybridization played in their evolution, they also show we have lost more Hawaiian honeycreeper lineages than we previously knew. The study highlights how improvements in genetic sequencing have transformed traditional natural history museum collections into vast repositories of historical and comparative genetic information. The genomic data we generated for this study will also be useful for understanding the morphological evolution of the honeycreepers, as well as to offer clues about how the genomic variation of some honeycreeper species may have influenced their ability to survive disease.

Michael Campana
Smithsonian Institution

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This page is a summary of: Reticulated adaptive radiation and phylogenomic diversity loss in the Hawaiian honeycreepers, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2536533123.
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