Suavipsitta, Mathews, 1917

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 : 66

Suavipsitta , Cyclopsitta , and Psittaculirostris

The fig parrots are among the smallest of all parrots. Predominantly green (one species has orange underparts), they have richly colored and diversely patterned facial plumages characterized by shades of red and blue, sometimes black, and which are often sexually dichromatic. Psittaculirostris are the largest and have strikingly colored elongate, lanceolate facial feathers. They are frugivorous and, again almost uniquely in parrots, they excavate rather than use existing hollows for nests in rainforest trees. They range across Indonesia, New Guinea, and Australia.

Two genera, Cyclopsitta and Psittaculirostris , are currently recognized. We recognize longrunning, contentious debate about whether Cyclopsitta should be used instead of Opopsitta (e.g., Mathews, 1916; Holyoak, 1970; Storr, 1973, Schodde, 1978; Schnitker, 2014) but follow the decision to use Cyclopsitta . Previous work by Mitchell et al. (2021) and phylogenomic trees show that Cyclopsitta was paraphyletic (fig. 14), and Psittaculirostris , while monophyletic, was nested within Cyclopsitta . The complexes of taxa long treated as subspecies of C. gulielmitertii and C. diophthalma have not been completely sampled for molecular data. With that caveat, C. gulielmitertii emerged as sister to a clade comprising Psittaculirostris and the similarly diverse, polytypic C. diophthalma complex. Note that this is based on the limited taxon sampling that has been done in a mitochondrial genome analysis ( Mitchell et al., 2021) and in our phylogenomic analysis. In our study, as iterated before, we sampled only one individual per species. In contrast, Mitchell et al. (2021) sampled several but not every subspecies in C. diophthalma , and in C. gulielmitertii they sampled just one individual of C. gulielmitertii melanogenia . It is worth noting that the same C. gulielmitertii sample (ANWC B 56211) was used here and by Mitchell et al. (2021). Within Psittaculirostris , P. edwardsii and P. salvadorii diverged 0.8 Mya (0.4–1.6) and the ancestor of these taxa diverged from P. desmarestii 1.8 Mya (0.7–2.8; fig. 14).

A case to break up Cyclopsitta had been made on morphological and ecological grounds ( Schnitker, 2014), reinforcing the molecular data that show the genus to be paraphyletic. Suavipsitta Mathews, 1917 , is available for all taxa within the polytypic gulielmitertii complex (see Mathews 1917b), whether ascribed species or subspecies rank (see summary in Beehler and Pratt, 2016) in the recent trend to recognize more than one species within the gulielmitertii complex). The only alternative to not recognizing Suavipsitta would appear to be placing all these birds—including Psittaculirostris —in one genus. We argue that this would unhelpfully obscure the group’s phenotypic and phylogenetic diversity. It also simply repeats the recognition of the group at tribe level in Cyclopsittini. We therefore endorse the recognition of Suavipsitta .

Satisfactory species-level taxonomies for both the C. diophthalma and S. gulielmitertii complexes await molecular studies with full taxon sampling.