Hydropsalis roraimae, (CHAPMAN, 1929)

Sigurðsson, Snorri & Cracraft, Joel, 2014, Deciphering the diversity and history of New World nightjars (Aves: Caprimulgidae) using molecular phylogenetics, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 170 (3), pp. 506-545 : 542

HYDROPSALIS RORAIMAE (CHAPMAN, 1929)

Definition

Previously Caprimulgus longirostris roraimae . It is elevated to full species status. It is the sister species

of H. ruficervix . Together the two species form a clade that is sister to H. longirostris .

Diagnosis

Large, very dark, long-billed nightjar with few markings in plumage. It is most similar to H. ruficervix , but is both larger and darker.

There is genetic divergence in both ND2 and ACO1 I9, with 3.7% divergence in ND2 between H. roraimae and H. ruficervix and 5% divergence between the two and H. longirostris .

Comments

Genetic evidence in this study supports elevating the two closely related subspecies of H. longirostris , H. l. roraimae and H. l. ruficervix , to phylogenetic species status, as they are genetically divergent from the remaining taxa assigned to H. longirostris (H. l. atripunctatus, H. l. bifasciatus, H. l. longirostris , and H. l. patagonicus), as well as from one another ( Fig. 7 ). This is in agreement with the suggestions of Cleere (2010), at least regarding H. l. roraimae .

Figures

Figure 7. A phylogeny of the Hydropsalis group of the South American clade based on a maximum-likelihood (ML) analysis of a concatenated 5298-bp molecular data set. ML bootstrap values higher than 60 and Bayesian posterior probability values higher than 0.95 are displayed on the nodes. Names on the tree represent current taxonomy; names on the right represent those resulting from this revision (see text).