{"id":20087,"date":"2024-02-04T02:25:41","date_gmt":"2024-02-03T20:55:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/?p=20087"},"modified":"2025-04-05T22:18:01","modified_gmt":"2025-04-05T16:48:01","slug":"aldabra-rail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/aldabra-rail\/","title":{"rendered":"Aldabra rail"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><strong>About Aldabra rail:<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Scientific name:<\/strong> Dryolimnas cuvieri aldabranus<\/li>\n<li>It lives on a coral atoll off the <strong>southeast coast of Africa.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Appearance<\/strong>: It&#8217;s about the size of a chicken, with a flecked gray back, a rusty red head and chest and a white throat.<\/li>\n<li>It is a subspecies of <strong>the white-throated rail<\/strong> (Dryolimnas cuvieri) and is the only living flightless bird in the Indian Ocean.<\/li>\n<li>In losing its ability to fly once again, the Aldabra rail has essentially evolved twice, rising from the dead through a process called iterative evolution.<\/li>\n<li>A 2019 study published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society examined the fossil record of rails in Aldabra and found evidence of a flightless rail on the atoll from before it was submerged beneath the waves 136,000 years ago.\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>What is Iterative evolution?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Iterative evolution can be defined as &#8220;the repeated evolution of a specific trait or body plan from the same ancestral lineage at different points in time.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Q1: What is an atoll ?<\/h3>\n<p>It is a ring-shaped coral reef, island, or series of islets. An atoll surrounds a body of water called a lagoon. Sometimes, atolls and lagoons protect a central island. Channels between islets connect a lagoon to the open ocean or sea.<\/p>\n<p>\nSource:<a href=\"https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/animals\/birds\/aldabra-rail-the-bird-that-came-back-from-the-dead-by-evolving-twice\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Aldabra rail: The bird that came back from the dead by evolving twice<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Aldabra rail lives on a coral atoll off the southeast coast of Africa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":20088,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-20087","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upsc-prelims-current-affairs","8":"no-featured-image-padding"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}