Taxonomic revision of the Red-fronted Tinkerbird Pogoniulus pusillus (Dumont, 1816) based on molecular and phenotypic analyses

Abstract

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Continent-Wide Patterns of Song Variation Predicted by Classical Rules of Biogeography

“…We obtained continent-wide morphometric data (Fig. 2a) from 668 tinkerbird specimens (P. bilineatus: 329; P. chrysoconus: 138; P. pusillus: 117 and P. subsulphureus: 84) most of which were measured for previous studies (Nwankwo et al 2018;Kirschel et al 2020bKirschel et al , 2021, from ornithology collections (Table S1, see also 10.6084/m9.figshare.20066225). In parallel with our morphometric measurements from museum study skins, we also took biometrics of 669 tinkerbirds of the four species that were ringed between 2004 and 2021 during extensive fieldwork across the African continent (P. bilineatus: 135; P. chrysoconus: 215; P. pusillus: 270 and P. subsulphureus: 49) (Kirschel et al 2009b;Nwankwo et al 2019;Kirschel et al 2020b) (Fig.…”

“…We pooled all data from P. chrysoconus and P. pusillus into a single taxon for our statistical analysis, for two reasons. First, the two species hybridise extensively in contact zones where many of our field measurements were obtained (Nwankwo et al 2019;Kirschel et al 2020a), meaning many individuals had mixed ancestry of varying proportions, and could not reliably be assigned to either species, and second, the monophyly of each currently recognised species in this group has recently been brought into question (Kirschel et al 2021), rendering possible analyses at the species level spurious.…”

“…A total of 1588 tinkerbird songs were recorded (Fig. 2c) between 2004 and 2021 (P. bilineatus: 379, P. chrysoconus: 388, P. pusillus: 536 and P. subsulphureus: 285, as identified in the field based on plumage) towards studies focusing on specific regions or species (Kirschel et al 2009b(Kirschel et al , 2020b(Kirschel et al , 2021Nwankwo et al 2018;Sebastianelli et al 2021). We added 124 recordings from online repositories (e.g.…”

“…Because P. chrysoconus and P. pusillus hybridise where they meet, species identification based on plumage might not reflect the genotype of individual birds, and their songs are also similar (see Fig. 2d; Kirschel et al 2021), even described as indistinguishable (Short & Horne 2001, 2002. As for morphology, we thus treat P. chrysoconus and P. pusillus as one taxon in all our statistical models on song frequency.…”

“…Phylogenetic relationships affect trait variation, with trait values of closely related species expected to be more similar than those of distantly related lineages. To account for this phylogenetic signal, we downloaded the phylogenetic tree (http://www.birdtree.org, Ericson backbone) that best reflected relationships among our study taxa based on previously published phylogenies (Kirschel et al 2018(Kirschel et al , 2020b(Kirschel et al , 2021Nwankwo et al 2019). We calculated Blomberg's K (Blomberg et al 2003) for species specific values of peak frequency and field and museum morphometrics separately using the picante package in R (Kembel et al 2010), setting number of randomisations to 1000.…”