Loriculus, Blyth, 1849

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 : 64

Loriculus

Hanging parrots ( Loriculus ) are so named from their oft-quoted but rarely reported behavior of roosting while hanging by the feet from a branch like a pteropodid bat. The behavior has been described, however, for L. galgulus in captivity (e.g., Griffiths, 1947; Buckley, 1968). We would welcome modern data on this behavior in the wild, its consistency, or whether the birds have evolved responses to any physiological challenges caused by roosting upside down. Three out of up to 15 species recognized were not sampled in this study, namely L. camiguinensis of Camigun Sur, southern Philippines ( Tello et al., 2006), L. flosculus of Flores Island, Indonesia, and L. bonapartei , also part of the L. philippensis – L. camiguinensis complex and debatably elevated to species rank (e.g., Collar and Kirwan, 2023). Forshaw and Knight (2010) treated the relatively recently described L. camiguinensis as a subspecies of L. philippensis ; certainly the taxon is diagnosable by traits of plumage and size. Two subclades within Loriculus diverged 8.7 Mya (4.7–12.2; fig. 11), concordant with variation in bill color but not the presence of a red throat patch. Clade 1 is defined by taxa having black bills and contains L. tener and L. aurantiifrons of New Guinea and surrounding islands and the Bismarck Archipelago, and L. catamene , L. sclateri , L. stigmatus , and L. amabilis of Moluccas and Sulawesi and neighboring islands (fig. 11). Clade 2, which is defined by taxa with red bills, has a deep divergence whereby L. philippensis was sister to the other taxa in the clade ( L. pusillus , L. vernalis , L. galgulus , L. exilis , and L. beryllinus ) from which it diverged at 7.2 Mya (3.7– 10.4), although L. philippensis bonapartei notably has a black bill ( Forshaw and Knight, 2010; fig. 11). Within clade 2 L. pusillus of Java and Bali, Indonesia diverged from two sister pairs. One pair contains the widely distributed L. vernalis occurring in India through Southeast Asia and neighboring archipelagoes and its geographic replacement, L. galgulus of the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Borneo, and surrounding islands. The other sister pair is widely disjunct geographically and comprises L. beryllinus endemic to Sri Lanka and L. exilis of Sulawesi. The estimated divergence time between L. beryllinus and L. exilis was 1.3 Mya (0.5–2.2; fig. 11), indicating that this complex biogeographic pattern is a relatively recent pattern.