Abstract
Populations of ten Amazonian bird species were sampled on opposite banks of the Rio Teles Pires, a headwater stream of the Rio Tapajós, in the Alta Floresta region, northern Mato Grosso, Brazil. The river is 100–300 m wide in this region. We found a range of genetic differentiation from none to relatively high levels; six of the ten species studied exhibit what appear to be genetic breaks at the river. With one exception, the antbird Hylophylax poecilinota, there is no morphologically recognized differentiation correlating with genetic differentiation. From the perspective of traditional morphology-based taxonomy, the Rio Teles Pires is not a faunal barrier. Rather, contact zones between members of species and subspecies pairs appear more or less randomly distributed in this region, some being located at varying distances to the east, others at varying distances to the west of the Rio Teles Pires, with few following the course of this river itself.
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Notes
Other examples of strong morphological differentiation across this river are the members of the species pair Xiphorhynchus elegans / X. spixii (see Alexio 2002) and of the subspecies pair Microrhopias quixensis bicolor / emiliae occupying the western (southern) and eastern (northern) river bank, respectively (see Haffer 1997a; Zimmer et al. 1997); the forms of M. quixensis may actually represent different biological species too. No genetic material is available for these taxa.
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Acknowledgments
J.H. is grateful to CNPq (Brasilia) and the J.D. and C.T. MacArthur Foundation for financial support of this field program. He also thanks Dr. Edson de Carvalho and Dona Vitoria Riva Carvalho (Instituto Ecológico Cristalino, Alta Floresta, Mato Grosso, Brazil) for the necessary permits and Drs. F. C. Novaes and D.C. Oren (Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, Belém, Para, Brazil) for their administrative support. We thank the LSUMNS (Fred Sheldon and Donna Dittmann), MPEG (David Oren), USNM (Gary Graves) for access to specimens and/or tissues and gratefully acknowledge the field efforts of colleagues who helped collect this additional material. The molecular work (with help from J. Hunt) was carried out in the Pritzker Laboratory for Molecular Systematics and Evolution, Field Museum, Chicago, operated with support from the Pritzker Foundation and the Lewis B. and the Dorothy Cullman Research Facility of American Museum of Natural History (with support from the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Program for Molecuar Systematics Studies, a joint initiative of The New York Botanical Garden and The American Museum of Natural History). S. Ware assisted with preparation of the manscript.
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This work is dedicated to Dr. Ernst Mayr (Cambridge, Mass.) on the occasion of his 100th birthday on July 5th 2004
Communicated by A. Helbig
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Bates, J.M., Haffer, J. & Grismer, E. Avian mitochondrial DNA sequence divergence across a headwater stream of the Rio Tapajós, a major Amazonian river. J Ornithol 145, 199–205 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10336-004-0039-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10336-004-0039-4