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A NEW SPECIES OF SMOKY HONEYEATER (MELIPHAGIDAE: MELIPOTES) FROM WESTERN NEW GUINEA
Auk, The, Jul 2007 by Beehler, Bruce M, Prawiradilaga, Dewi M, de Fretes, Yance, Kemp, Neville
Etymology. - The specific epithet honors Carol Beehler, wife of the senior author, acknowledging her long and unstinting support and her personal commitment to biodiversity studies in New Guinea. The English name highlights the most distinctive feature of this novel species.
REMARKS
The genus Melipotes is an important member of the upland forest bird fauna of New Guinea (Salomonsen 1967; Beehler et al. 1986; Coates 1990, 2001). Virtually all upland forests in New Guinea support a single species of Melipotes. In each montane habitat, the Melipotes tends to be one of the most common and visible members of the local montane forest community.
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Systematics. - A comprehensive systematic review of the genus must await analysis of tissue samples of M. carolae, which currently remain in Indonesia. Therefore, we here offer some preliminary thoughts on systematics and biogeography of the lineage. First, using molecular analysis, Cracraft and Feinstein (2000) recently demonstrated that the distinctive subalpine frugivore Macgregoria pulchra ("Macgregor's Bird of Paradise" in Frith and Beehler 1998) is the sister form to Melipotes. We provide a provisional cladogram for the Macgregoria + Melipotes clade, based on external morphology and naturalhistory traits (Fig. 3 and Appendices 1 and 2). We did not believe it necessary to run the small data set through a cladistic algorithm (e.g., PAUP) because only a single instance of homoplasy appears (transformation of character state 8.1 to 8.0 for M. gymnops). In addition, note that we included basal-derived characters that unite both the Macgregoria and Melipotes clades. These are not informative in terms of tree generation but provide additional evidence of the monophyly of the two lineages (cf. Cracraft and Feinstein 2000). We note that the species concept employed here approximates the polytypic-biological species of Mayr (1963) but that we consider geographically well-delimited and morphologically well-defined allotaxa as species rather than subspecies.
Figure 3 supports the divergence of the Melipotes lineage from a Macgregoria-like sister lineage, with attendant character evolution from a large-bodied black montane songbird with a fleshy orbital wattle to a smaller sooty songbird with a circumorbital patch of bare skin. In this regard, Melipotes ater appears to be basal within Melipotes and the gymnops-fumigatus-carolae species-group appears to be derived. Within the latter clade, fumigatus and carolae appear to be sister forms with many shared derived characters.
We thus see an interesting pattern of geographic differentiation in three distinct steps. First, there is a Central Cordillera-Huon Peninsula split (proto-Macgregoria-proto-Melipotes basal lineages). Second, we postulate a colonization of the Central Cordillera range and Bird's Head Uplands by basal Melipotes from the Huon Peninsula, followed by east-west differentiation of this lineage into a western-Bird's Head form (gymnops) and a central range vicariant (fumigatus). Finally, we propose a colonization of the north coastal ranges by M. fumigatus, followed by isolation and differentiation of the Foja Mountain isolate into M. carolae. We suggest that speciation of carolae in the Foja Mountains is a product of the geographic extent and height of the range and its physical isolation. Thus, the presence of typical fumigatus in the Cyclops, Bewani, and Kumawa ranges may be evidence that these ranges are too small to foster the differentiation of a species vicariant of Melipotes (because of periodic extirpation and recolonization).
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