Queer NZ Quail paper

[Ian Southey]

I recently saw this paper http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Ad ... ne.0006400 looking at the relationships of the extinct New Zealand Quail. You might not think this is of much relevance to a forum devoted to watching live birds but these people are seriously trying to work out whether or not those little brown quails on Tiri are or are not New Zealand Quails hiding in full view of some thousands of birders and others for about 150 years.

After an awful lot of biochemistry and computing they do manage to determine what any bird book will tell them - that the Tiri quail are in fact Brown Quail. They also managed to tell that the closest relation of NZ Quail is the Ausralian Stubble Quail ... which has also been known for close to 100 years. About the one new thing they have added is a date of about 5 million years for the split.

Asking a question for which the answer is already known is a fairly human thing to do but to go to these lengths and in particular using these resources to reinvent the wheel seems to show a total lapse of scholarship. I think there are better questions that these people could have tested their skills on. I also don't think that it would take a huge effort to identify them.

Ian

[Neil Fitzgerald]

There seems to be no shortage wheel re-inventers.
While we are on the subject of brown quail, does anyone know the history of the birds on the Alderman Islands? Seems an odd place for some to put them, and a pretty small target to self colonise from the mainland.

[molesunlimited]

Is the 5,000,000 year split based on interpretation of the molecular biological data? If so I would accept it served up with only a very large dose of salt. Placing dates on such events with such techniques is fraught with innumerable hazards and more than the usual numbers of uncertainties.

[Ian Southey]

Neil,

It is interesting that Brown Quail are present on a number of islands. The most impressive is the the Three Kings. My impression is that they were once much more common here and they may have evolved a propensity to move about to cope with the erratic Australian climate. I'd say they flew there.

Ian

[Graham Saunders]

"Asking a question for which the answer is already known is a fairly human thing to do but to go to these lengths and in particular using these resources to reinvent the wheel seems to show a total lapse of scholarship."

Are you playing devil's advocate Ian, or are you being serious? There are plenty of things in science that are blindingly obvious to the layman, ... but wrong. For example, it's also blindingly obvious that two objects travelling towards each other, approach each other at the sum of their speeds... But, of course, they don't.
Until recently it was assumed that proteins in amphibians' skins were made up only from the natural amino acids; goes without saying, doesn't it? Except of course, now that some 'boffin' actually bothered to do the studies (previously they were expensive and time-consuming) that there can be the odd unnatural one in their too.

And sometimes the 'obvious' needs to be confirmed and stated. Take the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics:

"If A and C are each in thermal equilibrium with B, A is also in thermal equilibrium with C."

A statement so ***** obvious, I'm sure you agree, that it really shouldn't need to be stated. The fact that it does, and that it is so fundamental, that after the coining of the other three laws of thermodynamics it had to be given a name that it should precede the first law.


And besides isn't the paper more a general study of the genetics of the Quail, and the relationship between Australasian Coturnix species rather than a specific search for an extinct species? I think you're being ungenerous.

[Ian Southey]

Graham

I am indeed being ungenerous and quite deliberately so. I don't doubt that there are interesting studies to be done on quail genetics but I don't see why this work couldn't have been framed in terms of one of them instead. Unless natural history is impossible without a chemistry set the identity of these birds is very well known and I'm pretty sure there hasn't been a credible record of native quail since the 1870s in spite of a great deal of interest at the time. The general findings are not surprising and I agree that that is not entirely uninteresting. There is, however, described variation within the species that could have been fruitfully examined and that would have been new and really interesting work. Then there is the myriad of other more interesting projects that could be done on other species that are less well known.

It's just that one of the key stated aims, establishing exactly what species these birds are, is best interpreted as "I didn't do my homework" and I just don't think that's good enough. If the live birds were ever seen any decent field guide would have put them straight and standard reference books outline the history reasonably well. Not bothering to do this is lazy at best. The whole point of having "giants" in science must surely be so that you can stand on their shoulders.

Ian

[Graham Saunders]

"We wished to investigate the phylogenetic relationship between the two extant Australian quail species, C. ypsilophora and C. pectoralis, and the New Zealand quail C. novaezealandiae, as well as an extant New Zealand quail (Coturnix sp.) that has been resident on Tiritiri Matangi Island for over 100 years [8]."

I think your are overstating the aim of discerning whether NZ Quail was still exant. Presumably the field guides base their categorization on morphology, and as the introduction states there has been confusion over the various species and mislabelling of museum exhibits. As for not doing their homework; look at what they reference:

# Marchant S, Higgins PJ (1993) Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds. In: Marchant S, Higgins PJ, editors. Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds, 1st ed. Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press. In:.
# Buller WL (1873) History of the birds of New Zealand, 1st ed. London, England: Van Voorst.
# Gill B, Martinson P (1991) New Zealand's extinct birds. Auckland, New Zealand: Random Century New Zealand Ltd.
# Heather B, Robertson H (1996) Field Guide to the Birds of New Zealand: Penguin Books, New Zealand Ltd.

... amongst others. Although it is not entirely unknown for field guides to be inaccurate, is it?

"...using these resources to reinvent the wheel seems to show a total lapse of scholarship." - I hope the authors don't visit this forum.

[Ian Southey]

Graham

I don't mind if the authors do visit this forum. I find it hard to be emabarrassed about this. A short paper characterising the DNA of NZ Quail would have been fine and I agree with you, that it does have value. What I object to is the superficial scholarship that has been added in to it.

The species identity of any quail in New Zealand has never been in question yet these authors devote about a third of their discussion to it. Maybe there are some old tatty and fragile museum specimens that are hard to identify but in addition to the obvious plumage differences in the figures they present, there is also a non-overlapping size difference if NANZAB is correct. I dentifying populations of living birds should be no problem and it isn't. Buller squelched the possibility of the survival of native quail on the Three Kings back in 1891 or thereabouts and every ornithologist who has been there since has agreed with him.

They do quote some references, true, but if they researched the topic they could have found some real questions, the suggestion that the Three Kings Brown Quail might result from a natural colonisation for instance. A little harder might be the possibility of taxonomic variation within NZ Quail but Pott's note that West Coast birds were large and Buller described a very distinctively coloured male from Northland which suggests at least a North Island /South split is possible at the least. I'm sure there is plenty more that I don't about off hand.

I'm sure the lab work is difficult and must have required some real thought. But at least the same kind of thought and effort should go into the results too. Maybe I assume too much in thinking that this work is about quail but there is already a framework of knowledge that can be added to without having to make up non-questions.

Generally speaking, there have also been trees published in the past with just a scattering species in them but often key taxa are missing from them so old questions just go unaddressed. And then there's just plain weird stuff. There is, for instance, a biochemical paper on plovers which groups the Australian Hooded Plover with our Shore Plover in the genus Thinornis without ever having made the comparison or justifying it in any way.

Do the home work and finish the job is what I say.

Ian

[THWorthy]

I tend to agree with Ian on this issue - there is a very real aim by academics to a get published in highly rated (by academics) journals (necessary to get funding) and to do this some folk find it necessary to make the story more sexy. If the authors in question had admitted that any decent ornithologist (and I do not count myself among such folk) could identify all the birds at a glance with 100% accuracy (which is true without doubt!) and that there was no possibility that the identity of the Tiri birds they had worked on for several years was anything but the introduced quail - then there is no way they would have got this accepted in this journal. So they played the academic game - good for them - but from a fundamental knowledge point of view, it is a weak bit of work.

[Graham Saunders]

The arguments depend on which species concept you are using, doesn't it? The fact that the researchers investigated the DNA implies that they were using a genetic concept. In which case the assertion about knowing the identity, which unless I'm mistaken Ian and Trevor would base on morphology, cannot be supported. It's only with a DNA study could the identity within a genetic species concept be ascertained.