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horned larks (1 Viewer)

Richard Klim said:
José Luis Copete, Birding Frontiers, 6 Feb 2014: Horned Lark, not one but six species?

Today seems to have become Horned Lark day! OrientalBirding, BBA, Birding Frontiers. Where next...?
Click to expand...

Note the question mark. And the comment following the article on Birding Frontiers.

I am as keen as anyone to get three world lifers out of this but it looks like there is a way to go yet.

Steve
 
Can someone explain, very briefly, how the two recent papers relate to each other - if at all? I'll try and work it out for myself later. The first paper seemed to suggest they were all very closely related unless I missed something - although the tree indicated you needed to separate the Tibetan bird, if you are to maintain THL as a species.

cheers, alan
 
lewis20126 said:
Can someone explain, very briefly, how the two recent papers relate to each other - if at all? I'll try and work it out for myself later. The first paper seemed to suggest they were all very closely related unless I missed something - although the tree indicated you needed to separate the Tibetan bird, if you are to maintain THL as a species.
Click to expand...
Alström et al 2013 (www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=260323) sampled leucolaema, praticola, flava, brandti, atlas, 'deosaiensis' and elwesi (plus bilopha), and concluded that Eremophila alpestris is probably better treated as multiple species. But presumably they considered their sampling/results to be inadequate to support specific (pardon the pun!) taxonomic conclusions.
 
As someone who stopped studying biology as a subject at O level I clearly need to upgrade my knowledge to understand these articales. However given that it is possible to have convergent evolution in the appearance of bird is it entirely impossible to have convergence in the genes of taxa without there being gene-flow between the two?

Cheers

Roy
 
TringBirder said:
As someone who stopped studying biology as a subject at O level I clearly need to upgrade my knowledge to understand these articales. However given that it is possible to have convergent evolution in the appearance of bird is it entirely impossible to have convergence in the genes of taxa without there being gene-flow between the two?

Cheers

Roy
Click to expand...

Roy,
maybe I am not enough of an expert to really answer this one, but if I understand your question correctly, convergent evolution might mean convergent amino acid content in at least some proteins. However, the area of the nucleus commonly sampled is supposedly not important: they consist of introns, areas of genes that are excised before the rest is made into protein (more precisely, this happens at the level of mRNA if your biology took you that far). There is no reason to expect that convergent evolution would act on introns.

Secondly, convergent evolution does not have to be backtracking, so the result might be changes in other proteins instead of the first one mutating back to the form seen in another species.

Niels
 
TringBirder said:
However given that it is possible to have convergent evolution in the appearance of bird is it entirely impossible to have convergence in the genes of taxa without there being gene-flow between the two?
Click to expand...
Yes, you can have convergence in the genes, though detecting it would be very hard, if not impossible.

Mutation in the genes is is random, with a vast array of possible results; if it were as simple as that, the likelihood of getting convergence is minimal. However, survival is not random; only a very tiny proportion of mutations will survive, and it will be the same ones that do repeatedly. Example: any mutation in the genes that code for haemoglobin production, are most likely to result in a molecule that won't transport oxygen, and would thus be lethal to the embryo - only very few variants of haemoglobin would actually work. And if a survivable mutation can happen one time, it can also happen another time in another taxon.
 
One aspect of the part of the paper that I did read that bears commenting on: in the context of the biological species concept, paraphyly might not be all that big a problem at the species level. One recent example is the approval of the Trinidad Motmot by SACC (if I recall correctly the details of that discussion).

Niels
 
Farnboro John said:
BOURC hopefully! I saw the Tresco lark for insurance, it would have made sense for it to be looked at by the committee then rather than using their scarce resources trying to decide which of a myriad Cackling Geese was first.

I know we already questioned whether or not it had been actively submitted to them but in the world of work we have this stuff called "proactivity".

John
Click to expand...

If you are stilling planning on visiting Wyoming, and you end up in any sort of prairie/sagebrush habitat...you are going to get more than your fill of "American" horned larks...

(although I suppose the local ones might someday get split from whatever was presumably the subspecies that ended up in Britain...)
 
Nutcracker said:
Yes, you can have convergence in the genes, though detecting it would be very hard, if not impossible.

Mutation in the genes is is random, with a vast array of possible results; if it were as simple as that, the likelihood of getting convergence is minimal. However, survival is not random; only a very tiny proportion of mutations will survive, and it will be the same ones that do repeatedly. Example: any mutation in the genes that code for haemoglobin production, are most likely to result in a molecule that won't transport oxygen, and would thus be lethal to the embryo - only very few variants of haemoglobin would actually work. And if a survivable mutation can happen one time, it can also happen another time in another taxon.
Click to expand...

Thanks Nutcracker and Niels. I guess the point I was trying to ascertain was could the genetic differences between two taxa that are allopatric reduce over a long period of time. I realise that the expectation is that they would diverge with time but if it is possible for them to converge then this could explain some of the more counterintuitive results seen when phylogenetic trees are constructed.

Some of the conclusions I have seen published seem so counterintuitive as to make me question the validity of the methodolgy being used to reach that conclusion. Of course I realise that my understanding of genetics is very basic so I certainly can't refute the conclusions but this doesn't mean that I don't have doubts.

Cheers

Roy
 
Yes, it could happen; particularly if one bases a phylogenetic tree on just one or two genes, you are more likely to get convergences. The more genes included, the more robust the phylogeny becomes, as a single convergence will have less prominence in the larger database. Also increases the cost and difficulty of the study of course.
 
Being an ecologist rather than a taxonomist, I am more interested in entities that I can consider as species, rather than the intricacies of the actual separation. The concept of species seems so often in any case vague, and there are so many criteria by which species are separated. In 1986, on Demirkasik in Turkey, predominantly white rather than yellow individuals were thought at first to be Temmink's Horned Lark, but that occurs nowhere near Turkey. However the "shorelarks" seen were very distinctive, and I welcome the probable separation of E. penicillata
 
Xenospiza said:
I would do the latter. I think there is now plenty of evidence to accept that investigations on a fragment of mtDNA should not be used as a basis to split (or lump) birds.
But I am not saying I don't find the phylogeographic data interesting. It is interesting (but probably unsurprising) to see how bilopha sits right in the middle of most other "Mediterranean" Horned Larks...
Click to expand...

I agree, it is interesting data. But the driving factor behind the splits is the placing of bilopha. Drovestki et al suggest six species. But it can be done other ways that also satisfy the phylogeny presented: elwesi, bilopha, and the rest (for example). Or go the other way and make bilopha a subspecies of alpestris, thus making Eremophila monotypic. And then there are all the unsampled subspecies to be placed. Re-arranging the genus would be very speculative on these data alone.

Cheers,

Keith
 
On the Internet Bird Collection website, following is said about teleschowi:
“Race teleschowi sometimes treated as separate species, apparently not interbreeding with other races where ranges overlap.”
Does anyone have a literature reference for this? I know it was in the Sibley & Monroe list as an incipient species (Przevalski's Lark).
 
Przevalski's Lark

Xenospiza said:
On the Internet Bird Collection website, following is said about teleschowi:
“Race teleschowi sometimes treated as separate species, apparently not interbreeding with other races where ranges overlap.”
Does anyone have a literature reference for this? I know it was in the Sibley & Monroe list as an incipient species (Przevalski's Lark).
Click to expand...
Jan, I've often wondered about the basis for 'Przevalski's Lark', but I was only aware of the mentions in Monroe & Sibley 1993 and Donald 2004 (HBW 9).

A quick trawl found this...
  • Hartert 1927. Grenzfälle des Artbegriffes. I. „Inkonsequenzen“. JfO 75(3): 433–436.
Is Hartert suggesting that teleschowi is a distinctive form?
 
Thanks!
I found he also says: "I do not think that there is sufficient evidence that two forms of Horned Lark breed regularly in the same area, and I propose therefore to call all forms by trinomials"
 
Western USA

Mason, Title, Cicero, Burns & Bowie 2014. Genetic variation among western populations of the Horned Lark (Eremophila alpestris) indicates recent colonization of the Channel Islands off southern California, mainland-bound dispersal, and postglacial range shifts. Auk 131(2): 162–174. [abstract]

Beason 1995 (BNA Online)...
E. a. strigata is small, dorsal surface dark brown, underparts yellowish, nape walnut brown, eyebrow stripe and throat yellow. Breeds along coast from s. British Columbia to Oregon, with some eastward range extension in winter.

E. a. insularis, E. a. rubea, E. a. actia, and E. a. ammophila —primarily Californian races—all have pale yellow throats and eyebrow stripes; distinguished from each other by size and dorsal color. E. a. insularis, the Channel I. race, is darker above with no yellow on underparts. ...
Click to expand...
 
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