Broad-billed Sapayoa
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| Sapayoa aenigma Hartert, 1903 |
The Broad-billed Sapayoa (or simply Sapayoa), Sapayoa aenigma, is a suboscine passerine found in lowland rainforests in Panama and northwest South America. As the epithet aenigma implies, its relationships have long been elusive.
The Sapayoa is a small, olive-colored bird, somewhat paler below and with a yellowish throat. It suggests a bigger, longer-tailed, broader-billed female manakin. It is rare to uncommon in the forest understory, favoring ravines and small streams (Ridgely & Tudor 1994). It is usually seen in pairs or mixed-species flocks. It spends long periods perching, then sallies up to pick fruit or catch insects, on foliage or in mid air, with its flat, wide bill (behavior that Ridgely and Tudor [1994] compare to a flatbill's). Other aspects of its biology are unknown (Kemp & Sherley 2003).
It was always considered a monotypic genus Sapayoa and historically regarded as a New World suboscine; in particular, it was assigned to the manakin family (Pipridae). However, the species was listed as incertae sedis (position uncertain) by Sibley and Ahlquist (1990), because
"preliminary DNA-DNA hybridization comparisons [...] indicate that this species is either a relative of the Old World Eurylaimidae or a sister group of all other Tyrannida, as suggested by earlier biochemical studies [...] In any event, it is not a close relative of manakins or any other recent tyrannoid."
More recent research suggests that it is not a New World suboscine at all, but an Old World suboscine. Chesser (2004) shows that the Sapoyoa is an outlier to the New World suboscines. Fjeldså et al. (2003) go further; analyzing nDNA myoglobin intron 2 and GAPDH intron 11 sequence data, they find the Sapayoa "as a deep branch in the group of broadbills and pittas of the Old World tropics." Accordingly, the Sapayoa would be the last surviving New World species of a lineage that evolved in Australia-New Guinea when Gondwana was in the process of splitting apart. The Sapayoa's ancestors are hypothesized to have reached South America via the Western Antarctica Peninsula.
Nowadays, the Sapoyoa is sometimes placed in the family Eurylaimidae with the broadbills. Others tentatively place the Sapayoa in the asity family Philepittidae (Kemp & Sherley 2003),[2] otherwise found only in Madagascar and sometimes included in the broadbill family.
However, the divergence between the broadbills and the Sapayoa found by Fjeldså et al. (2003) is only slightly less deep than that between the Sapayoa and the pittas. It is even possible though unlikely that the present species is actually closer to the pittas than to the broadbills. Consequently, Irestedt et al. (2006) place the Broad-billed Sapayoa in its own monotypic family Sapayoidae.
[edit] References
- Chesser, R. Terry (2004): Molecular systematics of New World suboscine birds. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 32(1): 11-24. doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2003.11.015 PDF fulltext
- Fjeldså, Jon; Zuccon, Dario; Irestedt, Martin; Johansson, Ulf S. & Ericson, Per G.P. (2003): Sapayoa aenigma: a New World representative of 'Old World suboscines'. Proc. R. Soc. B 270(Supplement 2): 238-241. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2003.0075 PDF fulltext Electronic supplement
- Irestedt, M.; Ohlson, J.I.; Zuccon, Dario; Källersjö, M. & Ericson, Per G.P. (2006): Nuclear DNA from old collections of avian study skins reveals the evolutionary history of the Old World suboscines (Aves: Passeriformes). Zool. Scripta 35(): 567-580. doi:10.1111/j.1463-6409.2006.00249.x (HTML abstract)
- Kemp, Alan & Sherley, Greg H. (2003): Asities. In: Perrins, Christopher (editor): Firefly Encyclopedia of Birds: 421. Firefly Books. ISBN 1-55297-777-3
- Ridgely, Robert S., & Tudor, Guy. 1994. The Birds of South America. Volume II: The Suboscine Passerines: 689, Plate 46. University of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-77063-4. Quoted by Roberson.
- Sibley, Charles Gald & Monroe, Burt L. Jr. (1990): Distribution and taxonomy of the birds of the world: A Study in Molecular Evolution. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. ISBN 0-300-04969-2
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ BirdLife International (2004). Sapayoa aenigma. 2006 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. IUCN 2006. Retrieved on 12 May 2006. Database entry includes justification for why this species is of least concern
- ^ It is not clear whether Kemp and Sherley or Perrins decided to include the Broad-billed Sapayoa in the Philepittidae.
