Gentoo penguins to be split into four species?

[amur leopard]

Here is an interesting article about a suggested split of the gentoo penguin into four different species, despite the species currently only having two subspecies!

Gentoo penguins are four species, not one

 

[Chlidonias]

The citation is given as "Joshua Tyler, Matthew T. Bonfitto, Gemma V. Clucas, Sushma Reddy, Jane L. Younger. Morphometric and genetic evidence for four species of gentoo penguin. Ecology and Evolution"

However the paper does not show up for me in a Google search, even on the journal's website.

 

[CheeseChameleon1945]

This seems....... a little unlikely.

 

[lintworm]

Study is online now:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.6973

It seems that they use a PSC approach and at least some of the methodology is flawed (multivariate analysis is only a good tool if the different input variables are independent and it is quite clear they aren't). Overall still interesting to find such genetic differences and some morphological differences (on a small dataset), but it seems they have forgotten that you can also call them subspecies instead of full species. I haven't seen results that show these different populations aren't simply a cline with gene flow between them, but I skimmed parts of the article so might have missed that...

 

[CheeseChameleon1945]

Study is online now:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.6973

It seems that they use a PSC approach and at least some of the methodology is flawed (multivariate analysis is only a good tool if the different input variables are independent and it is quite clear they aren't). Overall still interesting to find such genetic differences and some morphological differences (on a small dataset), but it seems they have forgotten that you can also call them subspecies instead of full species. I haven't seen results that show these different populations aren't simply a cline with gene flow between them, but I skimmed parts of the article so might have missed that...

Yes, I am more convinced that these are subspecies, not full fledged species. The differences are interesting, but too subtle to be split in to multiple species.