1 research outputs found
Supplementary Material for: Development of the Visual System in a Burrow-Nesting Seabird: Leach's Storm Petrel
<p>Little is known about the development of vision in wild birds. It is
unknown, for example, whether the ability to see can be predicted by the
level of prenatal growth or whether the eyes are open at hatching in a
particular species. In this study, we investigated the growth of eyes,
the formation of retinal ganglion cell topography, and the appearance of
simple, visually guided behaviours in chicks of a small procellariiform
seabird, Leach's storm petrel (<i>Oceanodroma leucorhoa</i>). This
semi-precocial species, which has a well-developed sense of smell, nests
in underground burrows where adults provision chicks for 6-8 weeks in
the dark before fledging. Retinal ganglion cell topographic maps
revealed that fine-tuning of cell distribution does not happen early in
development, but rather that the ganglion cell layer continues to mature
throughout provisioning and probably even after fledging. While the
olfactory bulbs reached adult size around 7 weeks after hatching, the
eyes and telencephalon continued to grow. Optokinetic head response and
artificial burrow finding experiments indicated that chicks in the 2nd
week after hatching lack even the most basic visually guided behaviours
and are probably blind. Thus, vision in Leach's storm petrel chicks
starts to function sometime around the 3rd week after hatching, well
after the eyes have opened and the olfactory system is functional.</p