Vampire Finch
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| Geospiza difficilis septentrionalis (Rothschild & Hartert, 1899) |
The Vampire Finch (Geospiza difficilis septentrionalis) is a small bird native to the Galápagos Islands.
It is a subspecies of the Sharp-beaked Ground Finch (Geospiza difficilis), the only significant difference being its diet. The Vampire Finch feeds primarily on the blood of the Nazca Booby and Blue-footed Booby, pecking at the boobies' skin with their sharp beaks until blood is drawn. Curiously, the boobies allow them to do this. It is theorized that this behavior evolved from the pecking behavior that the finch used to clean parasites from the plumage of the booby. The finch also feeds on booby eggs, stealing the eggs just after they are laid and rolling them (by pushing with their legs and using their beak as a pivot) into rocks until they break.
The vampire finch is sexually dimorphic, with the males being primarily black and the females grey with brown streaks. It has a lilting song.
The vampire finch is highly endangered, and is only found on Wolf Island and Darwin Island. However, the vampire finch along with other Galápagos Finches, forms an integral part of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. Biologists often call the Finches, "Darwin's Finches", as they are used as an example of how the descendants of one ancestor can evolve into several species as they adapt to different conditions. Darwin–(and his cohorts, for example, Alfred Russel Wallace), are now recognised as the men who provided the foundations for the entire structures of modern biology. Also, cladistics is now a modern addition to that structure.
