A Sixth Endemic New Zealand Family

[Michael Szabo]

Nothing on their relationships with the Australasian whistlers then?

[Ian Southey]

Yes. Whistlers seems to be one place they don't go.

One tree has them as a sister group to the fantails and more loosely to wattlebirds + silvereyes and robin + stitchbird. The other has them connected by a long branch to Australian groups - the crested bellbird, woodswallow +boatbill, a triller + an Australian cuckoo-shrike + an African Cuckoo-shrike.

The authors' conclusion "within the core Corvoidea lineage" seems a fair summation of their results and about what earlier workers have said.

Ian

[Michael Szabo]

Thanks for that, Ian. If they don't go with the Whistlers then perhaps the place to look more closely is in the vicinity of the fantails, flycatchers and monarchs?

[Ian Southey]

Michael

I'm not looking to narrow it down from the material at hand. Somebody else's hard work is needed to firm things up by sampling more representatives from families most likely to be related and probably sequencing other parts of the genome too. There's another couple of references with trees here viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1710 and they pop up all over the place. Regardless of the information in the sequences I believe the maths can do pretty strange things when species in a tree have no close relatives. I'm waiting to see some sort of concordance before I regard it as settled.

For a long time Piopios were thought to be their own family or primitive bowerbirds using morphology, gene sequences and DNA hybridisation but suddenly they have become orioles. That was so far out of left field it should have surprised everybody. Something similar could happen here - or not.

Ian

[Michael Szabo]

Yes, hopefully that work will be done sooner rather than later and the mystery solved.

Michael

[Neil Fitzgerald]

There will be an item on this on Radio NZ National tomorrow from 9pm, and again from 1:10 pm on Sunday, and then of course online after that.

"Yellowheads, whiteheads and brown creeper - a group of small forest birds found only in New Zealand – have just been formally recognised as being in their own endemic family, the Mohouidae. Alison Ballance joins Massey University’s Michael Anderson and Luis Ortiz-Catedral and Auckland Museum’s Brain Gill to find out why this is significant, and how the taxonomic study was prompted by research into New Zealand cuckoos."
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/progr ... ngingworld

[Neil Fitzgerald]

Here is the link tp listen to it online: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/progr ... ird-family

[Ian Southey]

In this thesis http://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/4681 the Mohouidae are placed as the sister group to Crows + Fantails. The Fantails have been fingered as relatives before so maybe there is some substance to that. More waiting and seeing.

I also see in the trees a fairly fundamental grouping which includes two New Zealand families Wattlebirds and Stitchbird with the Australasian robins - all of which are represented in this country. For someone brought up with Charles Fleming's biogeography the possibility that this could be construed as an old New Zealand centred radiation is intriguing. I am curious to see if the grouping persists in future studies.

Ian

[Ian Southey]

If you ever think you know where you are with songbird systematics just wait a bit 'cos it seems like it's always going to change. Well maybe they know about some groups but perhaps not the Mohouidae. These people http://www.researchgate.net/publication ... and_origin have the "core corvoidea" divided up into three major lineages with Mohoua diverging at the base as the sister group of all of them.

Not sure if I particularly believe this result at present but the difficulty placing this group probably makes these birds the most interesting of our songbirds from a phylogenetic point of view at least.

Ian

[Ian Southey]

Here's a more recent organisation of these families of songbirds http://www.researchgate.net/publication ... orvides%29 also showing the Mohouidae as a basal Corvoid lineage as above. It a bigger analysis with many more species and different statistics in it but I suspect they're using the same data so this result may not be a surprise.

It still suggests that they are a pretty old lineage.

Ian