While you are siting with your feet up, reading this column, I will be sweating in a suit, wearing a purple tie, performing a wedding ceremony.
Women get pretty worked up about weddings. Men not so much. The feminine half of the wedding party stress about getting the right dress, the right venue, the right time, the right food, the right seating arrangement, the right flowers, the right music. This is fine, although I generally feel the wedding itself is an almost meaningless event in the long-term context of the marriage. The problem is, this fixation on detail slops over onto the hapless males involved in the celebration. For example, the color of the men’s apparel seems to cause no end of thrash.
We recognize we are supposed to take this all very seriously and no one would object to the requirement to wear a suit and tie. Grumpiness would occur but we would still do it. This is, however, not good enough. The groom and his party must wear colors that augment and support the colors of the typically bizarre bridesmaid outfits. In my experience, this often involves a shade of purple.
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I speak from experience on this matter. I have been in wedding parties in a half a dozen states and three countries. In each instance, I was required to wear something purple. In the first (beside my own) wedding where I had to play a role, I held up one corner of the symbolic tent in a traditional Jewish ceremony. All four tent bearers wore black pants and jacket with light purple shirts. When Dr, Wifey and I were drafted into a traditional wedding in Bali, I wore a large sash that was, you guessed it, livid purple. I was an usher in a wedding in Paris — decked out in a lavender tuxedo. Just today, my favorite son-in-law reported he had managed to procure for us the purple ties that are apparently mandatory for this weekend’s festivities.
Thinking about my experience with the color purple in ceremonies in very far-flung areas of the earth just naturally made me think about the DNA of vultures.
The birds we see most commonly in the Northeast, identified in flight by their primary flight feathers outspread like fingers and sharp dihedral (V-shape) of their wings, are the turkey vultures. A large black bird, both genders are about 30 inches long with a wingspan of up to 7 feet. An adult may weigh 5 pounds.
A snapping turtle is the featured guest in this week's Sightings.
Turkey vultures are carrion eaters. They share the featherless head and neck with a dozen other types of vultures throughout this continent and even more on the other side of the Atlantic. This featherless situation is an important adaptation to their diet. Thrusting one’s head into a ripe carcass would tend to drag a lot of material into feathers and make a pretty dangerously unsanitary situation. The bare skin cleans up a lot better.
Just the opposite would seem to be true on the other end of all the vultures. Their body shape makes it common for the wet feces (bird urine and feces are ejected together) to run down the bird’s legs. This has two important functions. Vultures do not thermoregulate well. They are quite prone to over-heating if forced to fly energetically, for example flapping to get up to altitude. The breeze on the wet feces causes evaporative cooling which in turn cools the blood being pumped back into the overheated body.
Less intuitive, is the fact that this poop shower is actually a way of keeping the bird sanitary. Stepping in and on a carcass covers the bird’s legs with a bacteria soup. The strong acids present in the feces kill these off and keep any nicks and cuts from becoming infected.
The other rather odd thing about vultures is that these same characteristics have developed independently in at least three areas, yielding species that look very similar but are actually quite genetically different. All the vulture species found in Europe, Asia and Africa they have evolved from hawk species. This is what people first believed about our vultures as well. They certainly look similar with the great soaring wings and hooked beaks. However, DNA studies and the fossil record show that all vultures and condors in the New World developed from the same stock as storks and ibises.
Even more interesting is that DNA studies demonstrate without a doubt that not only did the North American and South American vultures come from different ancestors, completely distinct from Old World birds but also the North and South American birds had entirely separate evolutionary paths. This is one of the best cases ever seen of a concept called convergent evolution. This is when different species develop similar traits in order to meet a similar need. Clearly, the naked head and neck are strongly adaptive. Other traits diverge.
Old world vultures hunt primarily by sight. They soar at great altitude watching the ground below for signs of a carcass. Ours seek their food less by sight and more by scent. Unbelievable as it may seem, the big black birds circling overhead are actually sniffing the rising wind currents for the scent of a carcass, hidden under the forest canopy. The olfactory lobes of the brain are hugely developed for this purpose, the only bird species to be so.
Perhaps convergent evolution is responsible for the attraction of brides to the color purple. I tend to think it is something they teach in the secret woman classes but who knows. ...
In any event, Congratulations to David and Jessica!