To eat a sugar-filled diet, birds had to evolve some sweet genetic tricks.
Birds that feed on nectar and fruits have important variants in genes that control metabolism, fat processing and even blood pressure. Findings published February 26 in Science show how different lineages of birds converged on similar genetic workarounds to let them live the high sugar life.
Several groups of birds have evolved to eat these sickeningly sweet diets, including parrots, hummingbirds, honeyeaters and sunbirds. “If [humans] are eating a lot of sugar, then a lot of bad things are happening to us: metabolic syndrome, obesity, type 2 diabetes,” says Ekaterina Osipova, a genomicist at Harvard University.