Martin Garner,
Birding Frontiers, 11 Jan 2015:
Japanese Cormorant genes in Europe.
PS. Marion & Le Gentil 2006. [
pdf]
Just two short remarks:
- The name
norvegicus is unavailable because it lacks a description and an explicit type fixation. In addition, the type locality of
carbo is unclear, which is problematic here: the [
OD] is based on references that are a mixture of
carbo and
sinensis, and goes on saying "
Habitat in Europa;
nidificat in altis arboribus". The application of this name was restricted by
Hartert 1920 (without any lectotypification) to "die an Felsen nistende Form des nordatlantischen Ozeans" (the rock-nesting form from the North Atlantic Ocean), and this restriction is generally accepted (eg.,
Mayr & Cottrell 1979; albeit it is not really Code-compliant, and in direct contradiction of the OD, which states explicitly that
Pelecanus Carbo nests in trees). Marion & Le Gentil apparently assumed that
carbo would remain with British birds in case of split, but this is far from clear; even if Hartert's restriction is accepted, it might as well be argued that British birds are the ones that would need to be described as a new subspecies.
- Whether Marion & Le Gentil's "N group" is "more closely related to the Japanese or Temminck’s Cormorant
Phalocrocorax capillatus" cannot be assessed from the trees they published, because these trees only include sequences from
carbo and
capillatus, without any outgroup. I've joined a tree based on their sequences that I retrieved from GenBank, to which I added sequences from four other taxa, taken from other studies. As far as can be judged,
capillatus falls quite clearly outside
carbo.
