Linnaean Society Speakers Program

The Linnaean Society of New York is hosting a presentation by biologist Kimberly Bostwick. I learned about Kimberly and her study of the amazing manakins from an episode of "Nature". I look forward to this really interesting presentation.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009, 7:30 p.m.
The American Museum of Natural History, Linder Auditorium
Speaker: Kimberly Bostwick, Curator of Birds and Mammals at Cornell
University Museum of Vertebrates and Research Associate, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University
Subject: Cloud Forest Virtuosos: Discovering the Amazing Wing-Instruments of Club-winged Manakins

We often have the sense that all the major biological discoveries have been made long ago. In this talk, Bostwick encourages the audience to discover for themselves the solution to a mystery that puzzled even Darwin, and has only been worked out in recent years. That is, some animals exhibit exceptions to the rule of "survival of the fittest" and conform more to the idea of "survival of the sexiest". Male Club-winged Manakins, an Andean cloud-forest bird, is one of these exceptions; it has a unique, specialized, and very costly method of courting females, that will be revealed and explored in detail.

Kimberly Bostwick received her Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. She has authored numerous papers on bird ecology and evolution. She most recently appeared in the first episode of PBS’s Nature series entitled Deep Jungle.

The meeting is open to the public, without charge.

Programs are held in the American Museum of Natural History, Lindner Theater; please enter at West 77th St. between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue.