The last young to hatch will usually starve in years with little food available. Bi-parental care is given and the young are considered altricial.

They are fed by regurgitation of partly digested food when young, switching to entire food items as they grow older. After fledging , the young are fed for about two more weeks while they learn to hunt for themselves.

These birds reach sexual maturity by about two years, and generally live to around nine years. The maximum possible lifespan of darters seems to be about sixteen years.

Darter eggs are edible and considered delicious by some; they are locally collected by humans as food. The adults are also eaten occasionally, as they are rather meaty birds comparable to a domestic duck ; like other fish-eating birds such as cormorants or seaducks they do not taste particularly good though.

Darter eggs and nestlings are also collected in a few places to raise the young. Sometimes this is done for food, but some nomads in Assam and Bengal train tame darters to be employed as in cormorant fishing.

With an increasing number of nomads settling down in recent decades, this cultural heritage is in danger of being lost. On the other hand, as evidenced by the etymology of "anhinga" detailed above, the Tupi seem to have considered the anhinga a kind of bird of ill omen.

The genus Anhinga was introduced by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson in with the anhinga or American darter Anhinga anhinga as the type species.

However, in its first documented use as an English term in , it referred to an Old World darter. Ever since, it has also been used for the modern genus Anhinga as a whole.

This family is very closely related to the other families in the suborder Sulae , i. Cormorants and darters are extremely similar as regards their body and leg skeletons and may be sister taxa.

In fact, several darter fossils were initially believed to be cormorants or shags see below. Some earlier authors included the darters in the Phalacrocoracidae as subfamily Anhingina', but this is nowadays generally considered overlumping.

However, as this agrees quite well with the fossil evidence [16] some unite the Anhingidae and Phalacrocoracidae in a superfamily Phalacrocoracoidea.

The Sulae are also united by their characteristic display behavior, which agrees with the phylogeny as laid out by anatomical and DNA sequence data.

While the darters' lack of many display behaviors is shared with gannets and that of a few with cormorants , these are all symplesiomorphies that are absent in frigatebirds , tropicbirds and pelicans also.

Like cormorants but unlike other birds, darters use their hyoid bone to stretch the gular sac in display. Whether the pointing display of mates is another synapomorphy of darters and cormorants that was dropped again in some of the latter, or whether it evolved independently in darters and those cormorants that do it, is not clear.

The male raised-wing display seems to be a synapomorphy of the Sulae; like almost all cormorants and shags but unlike almost all gannets and boobies, darters keep their wrists bent as they lift the wings in display, but their alternating wing-waving, which they also show before take-off, is unique.

That they often balance with their outstretched wings during walking is probably an autapomorphy of darters, necessitated by their being plumper than the other Sulae.

The Sulae were traditionally included in the Pelecaniformes , then a paraphyletic group of " higher waterbirds ". The supposed traits uniting them, like all-webbed toes and a bare gular sac , are now known to be convergent , and pelicans are apparently closer relatives of storks than of the Sulae.

Hence, the Sulae and the frigatebirds — and some prehistoric relatives — are increasingly separated as the Suliformes , which is sometimes dubbed "Phalacrocoraciformes".

There are four living species of darters recognized, all in the genus Anhinga , [20] although the Old World ones were often lumped together as subspecies of A.

They may form a superspecies with regard to the more distinct anhinga: [21]. Extinct "darters" from Mauritius and Australia known only from bones were described as Anhinga nana "Mauritian darter" and Anhinga parva.

In the former case, however, the remains are larger than those of the geographically closest extant population of long-tailed cormorants on Madagascar : they thus might belong to an extinct subspecies Mauritian cormorant , which would have to be called Microcarbo africanus nanus or Phalacrocorax a.

The Late Pleistocene Anhinga laticeps is not specifically distinct from the Australasian darter; it might have been a large paleosubspecies of the last ice age.

Retrieved 20 August Engineering News. Archived from the original on 24 March Retrieved 18 September Jane's Defence Weekly.

BAE Systems. Archived from the original PDF on 13 October Retrieved 6 March Flight Global. Archived from the original on 10 July Retrieved 18 July Archived from the original on 2 March Archived from the original on 22 February Flight International.

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Learn More in these related Britannica articles: snail darter. Snail darter , Rare species Percina tanasi of darter that originally was found only in the Little Tennessee River in the southeastern U.

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