A gynandromorph cardinal: one half male, the other half female
Male cardinals are bright red while females are a dull brownish color to provide camoflauge. This particular bird sports the colorations of both birds and is literall split down the middle.
Here’s photographer’s description of how he saw the bird:
"As you can see, the left side is male and the right female. For two winters the bird appeared at the feeder of a retired high school biology teacher. I was able to observe it on several occasions, and noticed that it didn’t associate with other cardinals, nor did I hear it produce any vocalizations. We attempted to capture it with mist nets so that Rob Fleischer and I could get blood samples for further study, but we caught every bird in the neighborhood except this one! Alas, it never returned the third winter.
This, by the way, is a very graphic demonstration of the differences between males and females, with the brighter color of the male almost certainly reflecting sexual selection (with bright colors presumably advantageous in males because they attract females, but disadvantageous in females because they attract predators).
Now how does this happen? I used to see this sometimes in my Drosophila flies, and we’ve long known how a half-male, half-female fly forms. In flies the sex is determined by the ratio of X chromosome to autosomes. Flies, like all diploid species, have two copies of every autosome. If you also have two X chromosomes, you’re a female because the ratio of autosomes to Xs is 1:1. If you have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome, your ratio is 2:1 and you’re male. The Y doesn’t matter here: if you lose a Y chromosome, and hence are XO, you still look like a male, although you’re sterile (the Y carries genes for making sperm).
So to get gynandromorphs in flies, all that has to happen is that one X chromosome gets lost in one cell when the initial cell in a female (XX) zygotes divides in two. One half of the fly then becomes XX, the other XO, and the fly is split neatly down the middle, looking like the one below. But gynandromorphs don’t have to be “half and halfs”. X chromosomes can get lost at almost any stage at development, so flies can be a quarter male, have irregular patches of maleness, have just a few male cells, or even a male patch as small as a single bristle.
But in birds, unlike flies (or humans), the females are heterogametic: i.e., their sex chromosomes are different (the females are called ZW; and the males are ZZ). I’m not sure whether chromosome loss is involved in the production of this cardinal, or how that loss affects sex determination in birds (in humans, for example, unlike flies, the Y chromosome is important, so XO individuals are not phenotypic males but largely phenotypic females). An article at Live Science on a similar gynandromorph cardinal in Texas offers the following theory, based on the observation that in gynandromorph chickens the female side is the normal ZW and the male side the normal ZZ:
It’s not known exactly how gynandromorphy happens in birds, Arnold said. The predominant theory is that an error occurs in the formation of an egg, which normally carries one chromosome to unite with the single chromosome carried by the sperm. But if an egg accidentally ends up with two chromosomes — a Z and a W — and if this aberrant egg is fertilized by two Z-carrying sperm, the bird that results will have some ZZ cells and some ZW cells, he explained.
That seems unlikely to me because it requires the concatenation of two rare events: an egg carrying two sex chromosomes instead of one (but the normal half complement of autosomes), uniting not with one sperm but with two." (SOURCE)
That's cool
Humm, if this is real I find it quite interesting.
Quite Beautiful! When I was young,in Michigan, my mother fed all the reject birds that didn't have a flock and couldn't migrate and one was a male cardinal with a big white spot on his side. He stayed all winter and through the spring, summer, and fall. So did the one legged birds, miscolored birs and etc. Thanks for publishing this. It was quite interesting!!
Cool
Wow, neat, ashame he,she didn,t come back!
a genetic mistake occurred during the first cell division of the fertilized ovum, causing one of the cells produced by this division to be male and the other to be female. As this egg developed, the entire right side remained female and the left side remained male,” Ammann continued.
I am not dissputing anyone here, or even making a disbelief here of the person that sen it but it looks like someone might have been using photo shop or even messing with gentics.... I really dont know ... I wasnt there...I am just going by what i have seen in photos, and me being a graphic artist... Just saying ...
Im not buying the male/female combination. What i am thinking is the combanation of a partial albino and partial color~ and weather the bird is male or female you'd need to test the actual bird i would think to know for certain, unless some marking shows w/ out question. I would submit this to 'BIRDS and BLOOM' magizine~ and see what they say if it was in my hands.
Have you ever taken a science class, Anonymous person above? Of course this is real! It even happens in humans who are born with both male and female parts. Look up gynandromorph.
I don't believe this one. Sorry, color genetics don't work like this. Color genes act upon each other determining color of the offspring.
It looks like a mosaic of albino and normally pigmented male. It must be a somatic mutation. It is unusual for a mosaic to be so evenly divided along the middle, but it is possible. It seems a better explanation than a half male, half female bird.
Amazing, either way.
photo shop...I might have believed it more if the paint job wasn't soooo perfect...it's amazing what people will believe...LOL! Cute pic, but not real!
so interesting.......
Genetic malformations are not uncommon as they happen in all species. In humans the deformaties are expressed as polio,deformed limbs, and many other genetic malformations or genetic malfunctions. It is very possible that the great majority of these in humans and other animals, may be in great part due to the pollution of our earth due to and contributed by man's violation of nature. Let's look at what is done to the majority of our foods and the environment; and we'll find the causes for these peculiarities.
come on stop with the error and malformation, this is an awesome bird and perfect just the way it is
God's paintbrush at work again. To quibble over whether it's real or not is not unlike quibbling over whether there's a God or not -- or which one is real, for that matter. In a world full of smoke and mirrors, this is just a reminder that everything is possible.
In some animals, including humans, you can have two normal diploid fertilized eggs fuse at the single-celled zygote stage and then proceed to divide in such a way that half the resulting individual is derived from one and half from the other. It's called chimerism. Maybe eight or ten years ago JAMA or NEJM published a picture of a chimeric baby who was half male and half female. He/she/herm had been derived from zygotes fathered by two different men or one guy with a good range of skin color alleles, because one half of the baby was quite pale and the other clearly African-American, with a crisp vertical line down the middle exactly like this cardinal. (So no, it's not Photoshop.) I remember thinking that if the poor kid was otherwise healthy and grew up that way, he/she was going to get endless abuse every single school day for twelve years.
You can also have microchimerism whereby most of the individual is derived from one zygote but just certain tissues from a zygote absorbed a little later in the process. There are actually men who have different genotypes and blood groups in their blood than in their sperm. It's been noted that a rapist with this anomaly could be wrongly exonerated by a DNA test that uses blood. It's probably a very rare anomaly ... but who knows?
Amazing what people will believe...
my name is martin this is a fantastic brid and a great photo one would think if they did not try to capture it maybe it would have come back.. It knew all the other brids where being cought...or maybe it passed, however it is again, FANTASTIC to see....peace
Love it
Years back I had a balk Cardinal, that used to come to my bird feeder in Indiana. It came when sparrows were feeding, not ever with any other Cardinals.
Sorry, I meant bald cardinal. Should have proofed my comment.
You sure he just didn't fall in some red dye,lol
Wonderous!
I think ALL chimeras are beautiful and it has to do with twin genes..... I think the cardinal may be very well a chimera....not male female....but I am not a scientist with degree but have many years of study and even in the area of genetics and abberations.... These animals are ALWAYS STUNNING to look at but I was wondering if they tested it's genes?