Agapornis

Smith, Brian Tilston, Thom, Gregory & Joseph, Leo, 2024, Revised Evolutionary And Taxonomic Synthesis For Parrots (Order: Psittaciformes) Guided By Phylogenomic Analysis, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2024 (468), pp. 1-87 : 65

Agapornis

The lovebirds ( Agapornis ) are small, short-tailed, stocky parrots, mostly with colored bills and species-specific color patterns of the head and chest. The nine species of lovebirds have radiated within sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar. Pioneering analyses of their evolution were based on morphology and environmental data by Moreau (1948) and courtship and nesting behavior ( Dilger, 1960, 1962, 1964). Later, Racheli (1999) and Huynh et al. (2023), respectively, presented a cladistic morphological analysis and a phylogenomic analysis based on low-coverage whole-genome sequencing. The phylogenomic concatenated tree has high support (>95% UFBS) for all nodes, and the species tree had only one node ( A. nigrigenis and A. roseicollis ) with lower support (LPP = 0.88). The phylogenomic trees were discordant with the placement of A. taranta and A. pullarius , but this discordance was attributable to data quality. In analyses with more stringent filters for retaining samples, A. pullarius was excluded and the position of A. taranta became stable. In the concatenated tree A. canus of Madagascar then A. swindernianus were sisters to the other lovebirds (fig. 11). The next divergence was between a clade containing A. pullarius and A. swindernianus of western and central Africa from the five remaining species. The final relationships in the group had A. roseicollis of southwestern Africa as sister to two species pairs: A. nigrigenis / A. roseicollis and A. personatus / A. fischeri . This clade was also characterized by nest building in cavities: A. roseicollis builds a cup-shaped nest whereas the other four species build domed nests ( Huynh et al., 2023).

The topology of Provost et al. (2018) is concordant with the phylogenomic tree for nodes with common sampling except A. personatus and A. fischeri were found not to be sisters. The whole genome phylogeny Huynh et al. (2023) also recovered the same topology as our concatenated tree except it had lower support for nodes lilianae / nigrigenis and personatus / fischeri . Maximum likelihood estimates of species-level divergences cover a large timeframe, ranging from 0.7 Mya to 10.8 Mya (fig. 11). We advocate retention of one genus, Agapornis , for all of these species.