Littlest R sent her mother this photo, asking what this bird is. Any of you out there able to identify it?
A duck?
:rolleyes:
Maybe a muscovy duck? They have a range of feather colorations.
I am definitely not an expert, but it looks like a Muscovy duck.
ETA: ninja’d.
Muscovy duck:
https://www.birds.cornell.edu/crows/domducks.htm
ETA: ninja’d too!
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…
Agreed that it’s a domestic Muscovy Duck. Domesticated varieties have varying amounts of white in the plumage.
Moderator Note
This being GQ, let’s save smart-ass answers until the question has been answered.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
That otherwise OK link suggests that domestic ducks are white because people who bread domestic ducks like the color.
Actually, it is well known that white coloration is associated with mild behavior willingness to cope with humans in a variety of species. Notably foxes, but the research has been replicated in other species. Yes, you can bread a tame domestic fox: it’s white.
Big ducks with big white patches are likely to be cross-breeds. Muscovy drakes will mate with anything.
Muscovy Ducks are one of the few species of domestic animal that’s of New World origin. They are native to the tropics of the Americas, and were domesticated by several indigenous cultures before the arrival of Columbus. It’s obscure how they acquired the name “Muscovy,” an old name for the Moscow region. Most likely it’s derived from their musky odor.
But Muscovy Ducks don’t quack. They communicate by a hissing sound, both to each other and to owners as pets. (They can quack, but usually do so only under extreme distress.)
One way to tell, does it weigh the same as a witch?
But their hiss doesn’t echo.
“It is well know”? Really?
The only tame domestic fox I know of is … not white Domesticated silver fox - Wikipedia
Tame ducks and geese are predominantly white, but chickens are not, dogs are not, horses are not, cows are not, goats are not, rabbits are not …
There are a lot of white sheep, but their dominance seem pretty much to be a recent development and the reason was it being a better base for colored clothing.
So how about a cite?
Well, to be fair, the answer was correct. And, honestly, that’s the first thing I thought when I saw the picture, as well. “It’s a duck.”
I thought the indication of domestication in foxes and some other mammals was a white forehead blaze.
Roasted is better.
ETA:Article about domesticating foxes. One take-away:
“Some of these attributes (white spotting, floppy ears, curly tails) have been aptly called the morphological markers of domestication”
Animal evolution during domestication: the domesticated fox as a model
https://www.pnas.org/content/111/48/17230
“Comparative analysis of the domestic cat genome reveals genetic signatures underlying feline biology and domestication”
In the first one their “cite” for this statement is a collection of pictures of animals with white spotting. In the second they have no cite at all. And neither is a paper on white coloration and both are exclusively on mammal domestication.
To me it looks a lot like domestication through artificial selection pressure keeps color aberrations that natural selection pressure would be likely to remove. White color is one such aberration from some of the wild species, and it can arise from pigment genes or their regulators being broken, so it’s an “easier” mutation than many. Going from that to “it’s a morphological marker of domestication” looks like lazy science. Foxes naturally have white tails. Zebras are famously untameable. Birds which this question was about have white spots or coloration in wild forms so often that I wouldn’t be surprised if having some white coloration is more common than having no white coloration.
So absent a cite that doesn’t just show pictures of tame animals with white spots and goes “see?”, I’m going to stick with “Pure white tame ducks are the result of selective breeding for pure white ducks”.
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Domestic ducks with the prominent exception of the Muscovy are derived from Mallards. They come in all sorts of selected colors, as do Muscovies and in fact virtually all domestic animals, color being something people really like to tinker with.
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All-white poultry (ducks, geese, chickens, turkeys) are particularly desired in commercial operations because the carcass dresses out with a cleaner look. If you have only eaten poultry from the supermarket you can be assured that their feathers were white.
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White on the “extensions” of some mammals – paws, nose, tail tip – is indeed a first sign of domestication, as famously discovered in the breeding of fur foxes in Russia. When these foxes were selected for tame temperament, this (unwanted) white pattern spontaneously also appeared. This is probably due to neonatalism, the retention of juvenile traits (like tameness) in adults. These areas are the last to become pigmented in utero. So the unfinished pigmentation is linked to the juvenile temperament. Along with a host of other appearance changes.
cite:The silver fox domestication experiment | Evolution: Education and Outreach | Full Text