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Mangrove Finch (Camarhynchus heliobates) (1 Viewer)

Acrocephalus

Well-known member
Morocco
Speciation:
Brumm H, Farrington H, Petren K, Fessl B (2010). Evolutionary Dead End in the Galápagos: Divergence of Sexual Signals in the Rarest of Darwin's Finches. PLoS ONE 5(6): e11191. Full text

Conservation:
Fessl, B., Young, H. G., Young, R.P., Rodriguez-Matamoros, J., Dvorak, M., Tebbich, S., Fa, J.E. (2010). How to save the rarest Darwin's finch from extinction: the mangrove finch on Isabela Island. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 365 : 1019-1030. PDF
 
I recall reading somewhere, that there was doubt about the validity of the Mangrove Finch as a species. It was said that the Mangrove Finch may be just a form of Woodpecker Finch specializing in Mangroves.
 
I know very little about Darwin's Finches, so I don't know how these species are currently treated in the literature and don't know anything about likely gene flow or species status, but I was able to search the literature a bit. None of the earlier papers include Mangrove Finch for lack of samples, until Petren et al. 2005 "Comparative landscape genetics and the adaptive radiation of Darwin's finches: the role of peripheral isolation" in Molecular Ecology (if anyone wants this paper, PM me your email address). Figure 6 in this paper compares phylogenies of the genus constructed with microsatellites and with the mtDNA locus cytb. In both of these trees, the Mangrove Finch, Woodpecker Finch, and Tree Finches form a nice clade. Unfortunately, the figure is so poorly labeled, and the specific results in this clade so little discussed, that I can't read the position of species on the mtDNA clade. So, I downloaded the cytb sequences from genbank and reran the same analysis, just so I could match species to samples on the tree. The topology looks almost identical to that in Petren et al. 2005, so I don't think I screwed anything up:

http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/aa220/slybirdsly/Papers/DarwinsFinches-cytB.png

In the microsatellite tree in Petren et al., Mangrove Finch and Woodpecker Finch are sister, but in this cytB tree Mangrove Finch is divergent as the basal member of the Cactospiza/Camarhynchus clade and Woodpecker Finch is nested among the closely related Tree Finches. So, in the absence of information about gene flow among all of these, I would say that Mangrove Finch merits retaining species status.

Cheers,
Nick
 
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