• Question: Do you know how the St Kilda Wren came to be isolated on an island?

    Asked by tibby08 to St Kilda Wren on 11 Nov 2017. This question was also asked by esquerpaezj21.
    • Photo: St Kilda Wren

      St Kilda Wren answered on 11 Nov 2017:

      Animals become isolated on islands because the islands are quite far away from other land masses and not many individuals of a species are able to get there. The St. Kilda islands are over 60 km away from the mainland, which is too far and too perilous a journey for a wren to fly in one go, so they didn’t fly over. There are two options, then. 1) They hitched a ride on ships with people, or 2) they’ve been there since the Ice Age. The ship idea is possible, but the Ice Age idea is far more likely – the population would have been cut-off as the ice melted and the seas rose. This happened to a lot of island species. Studying the wren’s genome will help us to answer these sorts of questions.

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