Charadriiformes (1 Viewer)

Xenospiza said:

And why are the pied forms more attached to sandy beaches and the black ones to rocky shores?
There must be very few genes regulating the pied plumage.

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And is it actually limited to oystercatchers? You also have a pied/black issue in stilts, which are in the same clade. (Stilts are closer to oystercatchers than 'Charadrius' alexandrinus is to Charadrius hiaticula, based on published genetic evidence...)

James Jobling said:

Vaurie 1965, Bds. Palearctic Fauna, Non-Passeriformes, p. 370, and, by inference, Voous 1977, List Recent Holarctic Bd. Sp., p. 16, both considered meadewaldoi as a subsp. of Haematopus moquini, as did Cramp et al. 1983, BWP, III, p. 35. Johnsgard 1981, Plovers Sandpipers Snipes Wld., p. 56, treated it as a subsp. of H. ostralegus. Beaman 1994, Palearctic Bds., p. 29, listed Haematopus meadewaldoi Canary Islands Oystercatcher as a distinct species, as did Hayman et al. 1986, Shorebirds, p. 46, pl. 5.

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As was noted above, the origin of the treatment as a separate species is Hockey 1982, which you can read [here].
(Thus, in the above, none of the works published before a date allowing a 1982 paper to be taken into account treated it as a distinct species. This seems to have included Cramp et al 1983: Hockey 1982 is not cited there, despite a discussion of the status of the Canary Islands population; on a quick look I could not find any 1982 publication in the references listed at the end of the book, albeit the way these references are organised makes it easy to overlook something.)

Xenospiza said:

And why are the pied forms more attached to sandy beaches and the black ones to rocky shores?
There must be very few genes regulating the pied plumage.

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The association between dark plumage and rocky shores is not restricted to the oystercatchers. Consider, for example, the dark morphs of Reef Egrets, Black Turnstone, Purple & Rock Sandpipers, Tattlers (especially Wandering), etc.
Perhaps the darker coloration gives some degree of camouflage against the crevices of a rocky shoreline.

If the Canary Island black oystercatchers are a melanistic phase of the Eurasian Oystercatcher then Bannerman's name meadwaldoi is void? Then should H. moquini still be a good name for African oystercatchers since Bonaparte named them for the black oystercatchers found on Fuerteventura?
Moquin discussing black oystercatchers on the Canaries.
(https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/128816#page/63/mode/1up )
Bonaparte OD of H. moquini (https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/16553#page/1032/mode/1up )
"Une grande confusion"!

One extinct taxon less?

If black and pied phenotypes existed, but in distinct populations, without any co-occurence (which seems to be the case here), they would presumably still qualify as distinct taxa.
(In any case, they would certainly not qualify as morphs.)

l_raty said:

If black and pied phenotypes existed, but in distinct populations, without any co-occurence (which seems to be the case here), they would presumably still qualify as distinct taxa.
(In any case, they would certainly not qualify as morphs.)

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Stretching this even further, what are the implications for the Variable and South Island Pied Oystercatchers of New Zealand?

Has this BOU Twitter presentation been published elsewhere?

l_raty said:

If black and pied phenotypes existed, but in distinct populations, without any co-occurence (which seems to be the case here), they would presumably still qualify as distinct taxa.
(In any case, they would certainly not qualify as morphs.)

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Same would qualify to the eastern race (H. o. osculans) of Eurasian Oystercatcher which has a distinct and isolated population in Eastern Asia with different morphological characteristics compared to the 'western' subspecies yet, it is not considered to be distinct taxa (except del Hoyo et al. 2014).

SzimiStyle said:

Has this BOU Twitter presentation been published elsewhere?

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Not yet; still in prep / in press.

SzimiStyle said:

Same would qualify to the eastern race (H. o. osculans) of Eurasian Oystercatcher which has a distinct and isolated population in Eastern Asia with different morphological characteristics compared to the 'western' subspecies yet, it is not considered to be distinct taxa (except del Hoyo et al. 2014).

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It is considered a distinct taxon (osculans), which is treated by most as a subspecies of Eurasian. (Taxon is not the same as species!)
If I read it correctly, I think Laurent's comment was related to the earlier suggestion that meadewoldoi was not valid and should be treated as a colour morph/phase. I think the data presented still permit treatment as a distinct subspecies.

johnallcock said:

It is considered a distinct taxon (osculans), which is treated by most as a subspecies of Eurasian. (Taxon is not the same as species!)
If I read it correctly, I think Laurent's comment was related to the earlier suggestion that meadewoldoi was not valid and should be treated as a colour morph/phase. I think the data presented still permit treatment as a distinct subspecies.

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You read it correctly. Morphs must coexist in a (preferably panmictic) population--this is part of the definition of the term. Incidentally, osculans does appear to differ from western birds in mtDNA, see my post #79 higher up in this thread.

Variable and South Island Pied Oystercatchers do not seem to be separable on mtDNA either. They indeed appear identical in the recent Twitter tree; Banks & Paterson 2007 (Banks JC, Paterson AM. 2007. A preliminary study of the genetic differences in New Zealand oystercatcher species. N.Z. J. Zool., 34: 141-144. [free access].) found no difference between them based on 1733 base pairs of mtDNA; see the cox1 tree in my attachment to the same post #79.

l_raty said:

You read it correctly. Morphs must coexist in a (preferably panmictic) population--this is part of the definition of the term. Incidentally, osculans does appear to differ from western birds in mtDNA, see my post #79 higher up in this thread.

Variable and South Island Pied Oystercatchers do not seem to be separable on mtDNA either. They indeed appear identical in the recent Twitter tree; Banks & Paterson 2007 (Banks JC, Paterson AM. 2007. A preliminary study of the genetic differences in New Zealand oystercatcher species. N.Z. J. Zool., 34: 141-144. [free access].) found no difference between them based on 1733 base pairs of mtDNA; see the cox1 tree in my attachment to the same post #79.

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Hence the original name 'Variable', thanks.

mb1848 said:

If the Canary Island black oystercatchers are a melanistic phase of the Eurasian Oystercatcher then Bannerman's name meadwaldoi is void? Then should H. moquini still be a good name for African oystercatchers since Bonaparte named them for the black oystercatchers found on Fuerteventura?
Moquin discussing black oystercatchers on the Canaries.
(https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/128816#page/63/mode/1up )
Bonaparte OD of H. moquini (https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/16553#page/1032/mode/1up )
"Une grande confusion"!

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The conventional interpretation of moquini is, quoting the Richmond Index:

New name for Haematopus niger "(Cuv.)" Temminck, 1820 ("l'Afrique méridionale") not Haematopus niger Pallas, 1811.

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...which has the 'advantage' that moquini then inherits its types and type locality from Temminck's name, the birds Bonaparte applied the name to being irrelevant. Looking at the OD, this interpretation doesn't seem exactly straightforward, however.

• Cuvier 1816, in the first edition of Règne animal [here], simply noted that a species of oystercatcher with completely black plumage occurred at the Cape of Good Hope. He did not provide a name for this bird -- not even a vernacular. (He was, however, subsequently cited as having done so. E.g.: "Haematopus niger Cuvier 1816 Regné [sic!] Anim. 1: 469 — Cape of Good Hope.", in Hockey 1982.)
• Temminck 1820 used Haematopus niger [OD], attributing it to Cuvier, as denoting black birds from southern Africa and Australasia. (niger may have been a manuscript/museum name at this point, and/or it was viewed by Temminck as having been 'implied' by Cuvier in 1816.)
• The first time Cuvier himself used the name in press was in 1829, in the second edition of Règne animal [here], where the stated range was "the entire Antarctic hemisphere" (without citing Africa specifically), and where he gave references to Vieillot (H. ater, [here]) and Quoy & Gaimard (H. niger, here]), neither of which had described African birds. Cuvier claimed the authorship of the name here. If taken from (or assessed from) here, Cuvier's name may appear to denote a mix of Australasian and American birds, with nothing explicitly African included in it.
• Webb, Berthelot & Moquin-Tandon 1836, in Ornithologie canarienne [here], used the name, attributing it to Cuvier 1829, for Canarian birds.
• Bonaparte 1856 [here] rejected Cuvier's niger and proposed a "new name" for the African species honouring Moquin-Tandon, citing the Ornithologie canarienne, stating:

J'avais préféré la restreindre à celle d'Afrique; mais, outre que celle à laquelle Pallas l'a donné le premier a incontestablement le droit de le conserver, il n'est pas même exact de dire que Cuvier ait appliqué ce nom à la grosse espèce d'Afrique. Il a, au contraire, confondu sous cette dénomination les deux espèces australes figurées par Vieillot et par Quoy et Gaimard.

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= "I had preferred to restrict it to [the black-plumaged oystercatcher species] of Africa; but, besides the fact that [the species] to which Pallas gave it first has unquestionably the right to retain it, it's not even correct to say that Cuvier applied this name to the large species of Africa. On the contrary, he mingled under this name the two southern species illustrated by Vieillot and by Quoy and Gaimard."

Bonaparte did not cite Temminck. Although he did not explicitly state the source from which he was taking Cuvier's 'version' of the name, it may be expectable that this source was that given in Ornithologie canarienne (which he referred to); his comments seem to confirm this beyond any doubt: Cuvier 1829 is where the mingling of species that he described had occurred. Most importantly: Bonaparte clearly did not reject Cuvier's name merely as preoccupied; he gave two reasons for his rejection, the first being indeed that Pallas had given the same name earlier to another species; and the second, that he did not regard Cuvier as having applied the name to the African species.

In other words: we are told that Bonaparte proposed moquini as an absolute synonym of Cuvier's niger; but in fact the very last thing that Bonaparte had written, just before introducing this name, amounted to a statement that Cuvier's niger was actually something else...

Thank you Laurent! Thank you for the clarification. Thank you also for the translation. I was geussing about what he actually wrote. The type location of H. moquini is Africa.

Charadrius dealbatus, C. alexandrinus

Xuejing Wang, Pinjia Que, Gerald Heckel, Junhua Hu, Xuecong Zhang, Chung-Yu Chiang, Nan Zhang, Qin Huang, Simin Liu, Jonathan Martinez, Emilio Pagani-Núñez, Caroline Dingle, Yu Yan Leung, Tamás Székely, Zhengwang Zhang and Yang Liu. Genetic, phenotypic and ecological differentiation suggests incipient speciation in two Charadrius plovers along the Chinese coast. BMC Evolutionary Biology201919:135. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-019-1449-5

Abstract:


Background

Speciation with gene flow is an alternative to the nascence of new taxa in strict allopatric separation. Indeed, many taxa have parapatric distributions at present. It is often unclear if these are secondary contacts, e.g. caused by past glaciation cycles or the manifestation of speciation with gene flow, which hampers our understanding of how different forces drive diversification. Here we studied genetic, phenotypic and ecological aspects of divergence in a pair of incipient shorebird species, the Kentish (Charadrius alexandrinus) and the White-faced Plovers (C. dealbatus), shorebirds with parapatric breeding ranges along the Chinese coast. We assessed divergence based on molecular markers with different modes of inheritance and quantified phenotypic and ecological divergence in aspects of morphometric, dietary and climatic niches.


Results

Our integrative analyses revealed small to moderate levels of genetic and phenotypic distinctiveness with symmetric gene flow across the contact area at the Chinese coast. The two species diverged approximately half a million years ago in dynamic isolation with secondary contact occurring due to cycling sea level changes between the Eastern and Southern China Sea in the mid-late Pleistocene. We found evidence of character displacement and ecological niche differentiation between the two species, invoking the role of selection in facilitating divergence despite gene flow.


Conclusion

These findings imply that ecology can indeed counter gene flow through divergent selection and thus contributes to incipient speciation in these plovers. Furthermore, our study highlights the importance of using integrative datasets to reveal the evolutionary history and assist the inference of mechanisms of speciation.

[pdf]

Did I miss something? The ‘White-faced’ Kentish Plover has never got species status. Has it now?

SzimiStyle said:

Did I miss something? The ‘White-faced’ Kentish Plover has never got species status. Has it now?

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BirdLife/HBW recognizes White-faced Plover as a separate species, but not IOC, Clements or H&M.

The Background quoted above refers to "a pair of incipient shorebird species", but then explicitly treats them as full species in the same sentence, which seems oxymoronic.

I find it difficult to fully comprehend the concept of parapatric speciation, so this may be a dumb question, but wouldn't small to moderate genotypic and phenotypic differences typically suggest sub-specific status?

Richard Klim said:

[*][Burhinus indicus included within B oedicnemus]
[*]Burhinus grallarius to Orthoramphus

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What is the real type species of Burhinus, grallarius or oedicnemus? In the prodromus of Illiger, only Charadrius magnirostris Latham, is mentioned.