Scaly-sided Merganser (1 Viewer)

Peter Kovalik said:

...The results are different from the present classification, and we support Lophodytes cucullatus and Mergullus [sic] albellus to be members of the genus Mergus...

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Nutcracker said:

Had a look at this paper; with no species from closely related Bucephala included in the analysis, their results are very uncertain.

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l_raty said:

The results are certainly wrong... But as they don't appear to have listed the sequences they used (besides their own squamatus), it is hard to understand what happened exactly.
The fact that they recover Smew sister to Hooded Merg with 100% support suggests they used d-loops from Donne-Goussé et al. 2002 ([pdf here], see Fig. 5A) -- the Smew sequence in this study is a Hooded Merg sequence...
The cyt-b sequences of Mergus spp. other than squamatus are presumably taken from Gonzalez et al. 2009 [pdf here], because these are the only ones found in GenBank for these species; but these are likely to have problems as well (the Red-breasted Merg and Goosander sequences are much more similar than would be expected based on other markers for which sequences are available for multiple individual (e.g., d-loop, cox1); the RB Merg sequence is low-quality -- not complete and many nucleotides not identified).

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