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Ardeidae (1 Viewer)

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See also my note on vocal differences between Great Egret taxa:
Birds of the World

In summary, it supports a species-level split of egretta from the New World, a conclusion also reached by Pratt 2011 based on different arguments.
I ask this because I was reading the descriptions of this species made by old French naturalist authors (Buffon & Cie) and I noticed something that could imply quite a lot about the French names of these taxa (alba and egretta) if a split came. Things that don't concern English speakers naturally.
 
The cox1 distance between alba (n=8, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Japan) and egretta (n=12, Argentina, Suriname, Salvador, Mexico, USA) is 2.4%.
The cox1 distance between Asian (in BOLD: n=13, S Korea, Japan; additional seqs in GenBank: n=6, China, India) and Australian (n=1) modesta is about 2%.

The cox1 distance between modesta and the [alba + egretta] clade is 4.2-5.2%.

For comparison, the cox1 distances between species in the Ardea cinerea / herodias / cocoi complex are 1.3-1.4%.
 
The cox1 distance between alba (n=8, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Japan) and egretta (n=12, Argentina, Suriname, Salvador, Mexico, USA) is 2.4%.
The cox1 distance between Asian (in BOLD: n=13, S Korea, Japan; additional seqs in GenBank: n=6, China, India) and Australian (n=1) modesta is about 2%.

The cox1 distance between modesta and the [alba + egretta] clade is 4.2-5.2%.

For comparison, the cox1 distances between species in the Ardea cinerea / herodias / cocoi complex are 1.3-1.4%.
This would suggest a separation into three species 🤔

Do you have a tree ?
 
Do you have a tree ?

Part of the BOLD data cannot be downloaded (you can only see the stats for each BIN -- for ex., in the A. a. alba BIN, the German and Austrian sequences are not public; but you can see a haplotype network for the whole BIN where they appear, hence you can be completely sure that they are like the public Swedish sequence).
I have attached a quick and dirty tree built from public sequences of Ardea (sensu lato), rooted with two sequences of Butorides and Ardeola.
(I tried to remove duplicates (seqs found under two accession numbers in GenBank, or both in GenBank and in BOLD), but I wouldn't exclude the possibility that a few remain.)
 

Attachments

  • Ardea-cox1.pdf
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Part of the BOLD data cannot be downloaded (you can only see the stats for each BIN -- for ex., in the A. a. alba BIN, the German and Austrian sequences are not public; but you can see a haplotype network for the whole BIN where they appear, hence you can be completely sure that they are like the public Swedish sequence).
I have attached a quick and dirty tree built from public sequences of Ardea (sensu lato), rooted with two sequences of Butorides and Ardeola.
(I tried to remove duplicates (seqs found under two accession numbers in GenBank, or both in GenBank and in BOLD), but I wouldn't exclude the possibility that a few remain.)
There are not data for melanorhynchos ?
 
No sequences of Intermediate Egrets from elsewhere than Asia,

The paper below presumably includes a bird from South Africa brachyrhyncha.
I don't have access to the paper , so I can't verify if that's correct...

Hruska, J. P., J. Holmes, C. Oliveros, S. Shakya, P. Lavretsky, K. G. McCracken, F. H. Sheldon, and R. G. Moyle (2023). Ultraconserved elements resolve the phylogeny and corrobrate patterns of molecular rate variation in herons (Aves: Ardeidae). Ornithology 140(2):1-21
 
The paper below presumably includes a bird from South Africa brachyrhyncha.
I don't have access to the paper , so I can't verify if that's correct...

Hruska, J. P., J. Holmes, C. Oliveros, S. Shakya, P. Lavretsky, K. G. McCracken, F. H. Sheldon, and R. G. Moyle (2023). Ultraconserved elements resolve the phylogeny and corrobrate patterns of molecular rate variation in herons (Aves: Ardeidae). Ornithology 140(2):1-21

Yes, correct, and they did recover mtDNA sequences, albeit not for all the species they studied.
(Their data are neither in GenBank, nor in BOLD, but deposited on Dryad -- you have to know they're there to find them.)
I extracted the barcode region of Ardea spp from their alignments and added these to the data set to build a new tree.
The uncorrected distance between nominate intermedia and brachyrhyncha for this region (and based on a single sequence for brachyrhyncha) is about 4.6%.
 

Attachments

  • Ardea-cox1.with-Hruska+al-data.pdf
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Yes, correct, and they did recover mtDNA sequences, albeit not for all the species they studied.
(Their data are neither in GenBank, nor in BOLD, but deposited on Dryad -- you have to know it's there to find it.)
I extracted the barcode region of Ardea spp from their alignments and added these to the data set to build a new tree.
The uncorrected distance between nominate intermedia and brachyrhyncha for this region (and based on a single sequence for brachyrhyncha) is about 4.6%.
The only unknowns in Ardeidae are Ardea sumatrana and Egretta picata



Obviously, they put their file in formats that cannot be opened !!!!!
 
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Obviously, they put their file in formats that cannot be opened !!!!!

They deposited the data set as a .tar.gz file, but Dryad compresses it once more into a .zip before it lets you download it...
(I had no real problem with it... Downloading 948 Mb to get 7 barcodes (~50 kb of info) felt a bit extreme, though. :rolleyes:)
 
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They deposited the data set as a .tar.gz file, but Dryad compresses it once more into a .zip before it lets you download it...
(I had no real problem with it... Downloading 948 Mb to get 7 barcodes (~50 kb of info) may be a bit extreme, though. :rolleyes:)
Files are in .md and .gz format after extraction
 
The .md file is a plain text file, which explains what the contents of the tar.gz file is.
The .tar.gz is a compressed archive file (similar to a .zip, but in a different format), so you should do a second extraction if you want to see what it contains.
 
I extracted the barcode region of Ardea spp from their alignments and added these to the data set to build a new tree.
Thanks Laurent for the detective work ! And the genetic tree provides great info.

It would seem that there are about similar arguments for splitting Intermediate Egret and Great Egret: Considerable genetic distance, morphological differences and some vocal differences. Relatively strong cases I would think (with still some genetic data lacking here and there).

In the case of Great Egret, a split into 3 (rather than 2) species seems the better approach when integrating all arguments.
(Unless there would be clear morphological or vocal differences, a further split of the Australian birds seems premature)
 
The uncompressed data includes close to 5,000 files, for a total of about 4 Gb, it's not something that can be attached to an email.
If you have a relatively recent version of Windows (I assume you use Windows, otherwise the problem would not even occur), it seems you should be able to extract .tar.gz files without installing third-party software, using the command line -- see the first procedure described here. (I don't have a computer running Windows at hand to test if this really works, though.)
Most of it is genetic sequences (.phylip, .nex, .fasta files) and individual gene trees (.tre files). Can I ask what you want to do with it, exactly ? Is there a part of it in which you would be particularly interested ?
 
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