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3 comments to Sooty Owl taxonomy |
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Yes that’s a fair point Andrew, I should have said “If you think species must be monophyletic then…”
Personally I think it’s wrong to require species to be monophyletic. One particular form of a superspecies (say one isolated on an island) might be subject to quite different evolutionary pressures from the remainder, and diverge significantly. But if you require all species to be monophyletic, then you might end up either having to keep them all lumped despite significant morphological differences, or else having to split the mainland forms (potentially into multiple species) in a way you would not contemplate if the island form did not exist.
On the other hand I agree that higher levels of taxonomy, eg families, ought to be monophyletic.
Murray
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There is a third option to establish monophyly: treating the PNG owls as one species and the Australian owls as a second species. And to complicate matters not every taxonomist agrees that species need be monophyletic, and many current species are apparently not monophyletic. This survey found that 17% of bird species examined appeared non-monophyletic: http://www.umbc.edu/biosci/Faculty/OmlandLabWebpage/NewPages/papers/FunkOmlandARev.pdf which plenty of splitting & lumping to come. Andrew ===============================
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Looking through the Norman et al. paper, they used only one example from each of the three species/subspecies, so it’s a very small set to make such a call from. On that note, would C&B have a problem with differentiating between Pomarine and Great Skuas, despite the distance in mitochondrial DNA being smaller than that seen in Sooty Owls (0.44% in the two skuas [1] compared with 0.4-0.8% in the owls). Just putting the cat amongst the pigeons (although I don’t know the mtDNA distance between those). Cheers!
Tony
[1] Cohen et al. Proc. Roy. Soc. London. B, 1997, v264, p181-190: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1688246/pdf/9061968.pdf