Chicks Go Wild
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Chicks Go Wild
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A wild rooster in Kauai, Hawaii.
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Credit: Illustration by Emily Willoughby
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Nature
volume 529 , pages 270–273 ( 2016 ) Cite this article
The feral chickens of Kauai provide a unique opportunity to study what happens when domesticated animals escape and evolve.
“Don't look at them directly,” Rie Henriksen whispers, “otherwise they get suspicious.” The neuroscientist is referring to a dozen or so chickens loitering just a few metres away in the car park of a scenic observation point for Opaekaa Falls on the island of Kauai, Hawaii.
The chickens have every reason to distrust Henriksen and her colleague, evolutionary geneticist Dominic Wright, who have travelled to the island from Linköping University in Sweden armed with traps, drones, thermal cameras and a mobile molecular-biology lab to study the birds.
Ewen Callaway investigates what happens when domestic chickens go wild
As the two try to act casual by their rented car, a jet-black hen with splashes of iridescent green feathers pecks its way along a trail of bird feed up to a device called a goal trap. Wright tugs at a string looped around his big toe and a spring-loaded net snaps over the bird. After a moment of stunned silence, the hen erupts into squawking fury.
Opaekaa Falls, like much of Kauai, is teeming with feral chickens — free-ranging fowl related both to the domestic breeds that lay eggs or produce meat for supermarket shelves and to a more ancestral lineage imported to Hawaii hundreds of years ago.
These modern hybrids inhabit almost every corner of the island, from rugged chasms to KFC car parks. They have clucked their way into local lore and culture and are both beloved and reviled by Kauai's human occupants. Biologists, however, see in the feral animals an improbable experiment in evolution: what happens when chickens go wild?
The process of domestication has moulded animals and their genomes to thrive in human environments . Traits that ensure survival in the wild often give way to qualities that benefit humans, such as docility and fast growth. Feralization looks, on its surface, like domestication in reverse. But closer inspection suggests that the chickens of Kauai are evolving into something quite different from their wild predecessors, gaining some traits that reflect that past, but maintaining others that had been selected by humans. In this way, they are similar to other populations of animals, including dogs, pigs and sheep, that have broken free of captivity and flourished.
By looking at feral animals, some evolutionary biologists hope to determine how domestic animals and their genes change in response to natural pressures. The research could also help to inform tricky conservation questions about how such animals affect native species, and ultimately whether and how to control them.
The natural history of the Kauai fowl makes them an important test case. “People have a really complicated relationship with the chickens,” says Eben Gering, an evolutionary ecologist at Michigan State University's Kellogg Biological Station in Hickory Corners, who is in Kauai with Henriksen and Wright. “Some people absolutely want them gone. Some consider them an integral part of the local culture.”
The Polynesian mariners who first settled the Hawaiian Islands about 1,000 years ago brought what they needed to start civilization anew. Staple plants such as taro, sweet potato and coconut palm made the trans-Pacific voyage, as did domestic dogs, pigs and, naturally, their prized chickens.
The Polynesian poultry probably bore little resemblance to the birds that provide much of the world's protein today. Archaeological and genetic evidence suggests that they were more like red junglefowl ( Gallus gallus ) — small, furtive birds that still roam the forests of southeast Asia and are ancestral to all domestic chickens.
By the time that Captain James Cook landed in Waimea in southern Kauai in 1778, the Polynesian chickens had already, in essence, become feral. They wandered freely between Native Hawaiian villages and the neighbouring forest. Later, European and US settlers imported predators such as mongooses, which devastated birds of all kinds. Polynesian chickens were all but wiped out everywhere but Kauai and neighbouring Niihau, where the predators were never introduced.
On Kauai, chickens flourished. Although the birds' numbers have not been tracked precisely, many residents contend that the population surged after hurricanes in 1982 and 1992 blew modern chickens from people's back yards into the forests, where they encountered the descendants of the Polynesian chickens.
Gering says it is possible that interbreeding between the two populations allowed the birds' numbers to swell. And during his first trip to the island in 2013, he and Wright noticed 1 that many of the feral chickens they encountered had flecks of the white feathers common in modern domestic breeds, in addition to the darker plumage usually seen in wild populations. Many had yellow legs (red-junglefowl legs are grey). And some of the roosters' crows sounded conspicuously like the drawn out cock-a-doodle-doo of their barnyard brethren, rather than the truncated calls of red junglefowl.
DNA from 23 chickens revealed just how far domestic-chicken genes had infiltrated 1 . The birds' nuclear genomes seemed to be a mixture of genes from red-junglefowl-like Polynesian chickens and domestic chickens, whereas their maternally inherited mitochondrial markers traced back to European and Pacific domestic poultry. Gering and Wright think that a single hybrid population of feral chickens now roams Kauai, bearing a mixture of traits from modern and ancient birds.
In unpublished work, the two have scoured the birds' genomes for stretches of DNA with very little variation across the population. This homogeneity suggests that a gene has surged through the population in the recent past, probably because it offers some benefit. If feralization were domestication played backwards, then these 'selective sweeps' might appear around the DNA sequences that distinguish domestic chickens from red junglefowl. Instead, the researchers have found that most of the swiftest-evolving genes in the Kauai chickens are distinct from those suspected involved in modern domestication.
In some cases, genes from the Polynesian chickens are helping the hybrid feral chickens to adapt to Kauai's habitats. For example, modern domestic fowl have been bred not to sit on, or brood, their eggs (making the eggs easier to collect). But in the wild, this trait puts unhatched chicks at risk. Wright and Gering found that feral chickens possess red-junglefowl gene variants that are linked to brooding.
But some genes of domestication do seem to be handy outside the coop. A variant linked to increased growth rates and reproduction in domestic chickens, for example, persists in the Kauai population, even though the average adult feral chicken is half the weight of a month-old bird bred for meat.
“You won't see a bird as healthy-looking as that,” Wright says of the hen that he and Henriksen had captured at Opaekaa Falls. “Her plumage is perfect.” In the basement of a rented house on Kauai, the researchers have set up a makeshift laboratory where they photograph the bird, draw its blood and then kill it and prepare it for dissection. Wright starts with the hen's Brazil-nut-sized brain.
Their unpublished research has shown that the brains of domestic chickens are smaller than those of junglefowl, relative to their body size
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