Some new Sunbird-species discovered in Indonesia :
Yahoo is part of the Yahoo family of brands
I can't open that link.
Here is the actual paper:
Small islands and large biogeographic barriers have driven contrasting speciation patterns in Indo-Pacific sunbirds (Aves: Nectariniidae)
The "new sunbirds" (
sic) is a split from the Olive-backed Sunbird. This is referred to as a "superspecies" and some authors have already taken to splitting it into three species. The "new" species in this paper isn't actually new - it was originally described in 1903, the paper is reinstating the name (thereby making four species). The paper also discusses a potential split in the Black Sunbird (between Sulawesi and New Guinea) but this is not named as such.
I'm going to have to read it better later because I'm going to get some armchair ticks out of it.
Abstract
Birds of the Indo-Pacific have provided biologists with many foundational insights. This study presents evidence for strong phylogeographic structure in two sunbird species from the heart of this region, the olive-backed sunbird,
Cinnyris jugularis, and the black sunbird,
Leptocoma aspasia. We assessed population divergence using morphological, plumage, bioacoustic and molecular data (mitochondrial
ND2/
ND3). Our findings indicate that the olive-backed sunbird should be recognized as multiple species, because birds from Sulawesi and the Sahul Shelf are closely related to each other, but widely separated from those in other regions. In addition, we provide evidence for an endemic species on the Wakatobi Islands, an archipelago of deep-sea islands off south-east Sulawesi. That a small bird could exhibit a range all the way from Sulawesi to Australia, while diverging on a small archipelago within this range, illustrates the complex interplay between dispersal and speciation. Our black sunbird genetic data also suggest unrecognized population structure, despite relatively weak plumage divergence. Black sunbirds in Sulawesi are likely to be a separate species from those in New Guinea, with a mean genetic distance of 9.1%. Current taxonomy suggests these sunbird species transcend classic biogeographic barriers, but our results suggest that these barriers are not easily bypassed.
