Task: Question Answering
Input (English): Context: Ixobrychus is a genus of bitterns, a group of wading bird in the heron family Ardeidae. "Ixobrychus" is from Ancient Greek "ixias", a reed-like plant and "brukhomai", to bellow., Florida (Spanish for "land of flowers") is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, and to the south by the Straits of Florida and Cuba. Florida is the 22nd most extensive, the 3rd most populous, and the 8th most densely populated of the U.S. states. Jacksonville is the most populous municipality in the state and is the largest city by area in the contiguous United States. The Miami metropolitan area is Florida's most populous urban area. The city of Tallahassee is the state capital., A "metropolitan area", sometimes referred to as a "metro area" or just "metro", is a region consisting of a densely populated urban core and its less-populated surrounding territories, sharing industry, infrastructure, and housing.
A metro area usually comprises multiple jurisdictions and municipalities: neighborhoods, townships, boroughs, cities, towns, exurbs, suburbs, counties, districts, states, and even nations like the eurodistricts. As social, economic and political institutions have changed, metropolitan areas have become key economic and political regions. Metropolitan areas include one or more urban areas, as well as satellite cities, towns and intervening rural areas that are socio-economically tied to the urban core, typically measured by commuting patterns., The lava heron ("Butorides sundevalli"), also known as the Galápagos heron, is a species of heron endemic to the Galápagos Islands of Ecuador. It is considered by some authorities  including the American Ornithologists' Union and BirdLife International  to be a subspecies (or even just a colour morph) of the striated heron ("B. striata"), and was formerly "lumped" with this species and the green heron ("B. virescens") as the green-backed heron., Quaternary is the current and most recent of the three periods of the Cenozoic Era in the geologic time scale of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). It follows the Neogene Period and spans from 2.588 ± 0.005 million years ago to the present. The Quaternary Period is divided into two epochs: the Pleistocene (2.588 million years ago to 11.7 thousand years ago) and the Holocene (11.7 thousand years ago to today). The informal term "Late Quaternary" refers to the past 0.51.0 million years., Alabama is a state in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama is the 30th-most extensive and the 24th-most populous of the U.S. states. At nearly , Alabama has one of the nation's longest navigable inland waterways., Birds (Aves), also known as avian dinosaurs, are a group of endothermic vertebrates, characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a lightweight but strong skeleton. Birds live worldwide and range in size from the bee hummingbird to the ostrich. They rank as the class of tetrapods with the most living species, at approximately ten thousand, with more than half of these being passerines, sometimes known as perching birds or, less accurately, as songbirds., The green heron ("Butorides virescens") is a small heron of North and Central America. "Butorides" is from Middle English "butor" "bittern" and Ancient Greek "-oides", "resembling", and "virescens" is Latin for "greenish"., The Miami metropolitan area is the metropolitan area including Miami and nearby communities. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget designates the area as the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL Metropolitan Statistical Area, used for statistical purposes by the United States Census Bureau and other entities. The metropolitan statistical area comprises Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach countiesFlorida's three most populous, together forming South Floridawith principal cities including Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Pompano Beach, West Palm Beach, and Boca Raton., The Atlantic Ocean is the second largest of the world's oceans with a total area of about . It covers approximately 20 percent of the Earth's surface and about 29 percent of its water surface area. It separates the "Old World" from the "New World"., Botaurus is a genus of bitterns, a group of wading bird in the heron family Ardeidae. The genus name "Botaurus" was given by the English naturalist James Francis Stephens, and is derived from Medieval Latin "butaurus", "bittern", itself constructed from the Middle English name for the Eurasian Bittern, "Botor". Pliny gave a fanciful derivation from "Bos" (ox) and "taurus" (bull), because the bittern's call resembles the bellowing of a bull., The herons are the long-legged freshwater and coastal birds in the family Ardeidae, with 64 recognised species, some of which are referred to as "egrets" or "bitterns" rather than herons. Members of the genera "Botaurus" and "Ixobrychus" are referred to as "bitterns", and, together with the zigzag heron or zigzag bittern in the monotypic genus "Zebrilus", form a monophyletic group within the Ardeidae. Egrets are not a biologically distinct group from the herons, and tend to be named differently because they are mainly white or have decorative plumes. Although egrets have the same build as herons, they tend to be smaller. Herons, by evolutionary adaptation, have long beaks., Butorides is a genus of small herons . It contains three similar species , the green heron or green - backed heron , Butorides virescens , the lava heron ( Butorides sundevalli ) , and the striated heron , Butorides striatus . A fossil species , Butorides validipes , is known from the Early Pleistocene of Florida in the United States . Adults of both extant species are about 44 cm long , and have a blue - black back and wings , a black cap and short yellow legs . Juveniles are browner above and streaked below , and have greenish - yellow legs . The species have different underpart colours , chestnut with a white line down the front in green heron , and white or grey in striated . Both breed in small wetlands on a platform of sticks often in shrubs or trees , sometimes on the ground . The female lays three to five eggs . Both parents incubate for about 20 days until hatching , and feed the young birds which take a further three weeks to fledge . Butorides herons stand still at the water 's edge and wait to ambush prey . They mainly eat small fish , frogs and aquatic insects . They sometimes drop food on the water 's surface to attract fish ., The Gulf of Mexico is an ocean basin largely surrounded by the North American continent. It is bounded on the northeast, north and northwest by the Gulf Coast of the United States, on the southwest and south by Mexico, and on the southeast by Cuba. The U.S. states of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas border the Gulf on the north, which are often referred to as the "Third Coast" in comparison with the U.S. Atlantic and Pacific coasts, or sometimes the "south coast", in juxtaposition to the Great Lakes region being the "north coast." One of the gulf's seven main areas is the Gulf of Mexico basin., The zigzag heron ("Zebrilus undulatus") is a species of heron in the family Ardeidae, also including egrets and bitterns. It is in the monotypic genus Zebrilus. It is found in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela. Its natural habitat is subtropical or tropical swamps., Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is a country comprising the island of Cuba as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located in the northern Caribbean where the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean meet. It is south of both the U.S. state of Florida and the Bahamas, west of Haiti, and north of Jamaica. Havana is the largest city and capital; other major cities include Santiago de Cuba and Camagüey. Cuba is the largest island in the Caribbean, with an area of , and the second-most populous after Hispaniola, with over 11 million inhabitants., BirdLife International (formerly the International Council for Bird Preservation) is a global partnership of conservation organisations that strives to conserve birds, their habitats and global biodiversity, working with people towards sustainability in the use of natural resources. It is the world's largest partnership of conservation organisations, with over 120 partner organisations., "Green-backed heron" is a collective term for certain herons. Small and compact among herons, these birds often feature green plumage  rare among the Ardeidae , in particular on the back, wings and scapulars., The striated heron ("Butorides striata") also known as mangrove heron, little heron or green-backed heron, is a small heron. Striated herons are mostly non-migratory and noted for some interesting behavioral traits. Their breeding habitat is small wetlands in the Old World tropics from west Africa to Japan and Australia, and in South America. Vagrants have been recorded on oceanic islands, such as Chuuk and Yap in the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marianas and Palau; the bird recorded on Yap on February 25, 1991, was from a continental Asian rather than from a Melanesian population, while the origin of the bird seen on Palau on May 3, 2005 was not clear., The Early Pleistocene (also known as the Lower Pleistocene) is a subepoch in the international geologic timescale or a subseries in chronostratigraphy, being the earliest or lowest subdivision of the Quaternary period/system and Pleistocene epoch/series. It spans the time between 2.588 ± 0.005 Ma (million years ago) and 0.781 ± 0.005 Ma. The Early Pleistocene consists of the Gelasian and the Calabrian ages., Bitterns are a classification of birds in the heron family of Pelican order of wading birds. Species named bitterns tend to be the shorter-necked, often more secretive members of this family. They were called "hæferblæte" in Old English; the word "bittern" came to English from Old French "butor", itself from Gallo-Roman "butitaurus", a compound of Latin "bti" and "taurus". Bitterns form a monophyletic subfamily in the heron family, the Botaurinae., An egret is a bird that is any of several herons, most of which are white or buff, and several of which develop fine plumes (usually milky white) during the breeding season., Subject: butorides, Relation: parent_taxon, Options: (A) alabama (B) ardeidae (C) area (D) areas (E) bird (F) bittern (G) botaurus (H) butorides (I) ixobrychus (J) la (K) neogene (L) ostrich (M) zebrilus
Output (English): ardeidae