HI:
I got this from the Bird Frontiers listserv. I'am about to give up and
call all large gulls around here Northern Gull (Larus borealis)!

--
Ian Paulsen
Bainbridge Island, WA, USA
A.K.A.: "Birdbooker"
"Rallidae all the way!"

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2003 16:23:39 +0100
From: Pierre-Andr? CROCHET <crochet at CEFE.CNRS-MOP.FR>
To: BIRDWG01 at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: [BIRDWG01] RE : [BIRDWG01] Palest of Thayer's Gulls?

Dear all,

Kevin is right to be cautious about the results on thayeri in our previous paper. I had not realized at the time when I requested this specimen from LSUMZ that this specimen was out of range, and of contentious ID.

We now have sequenced 5 more specimens of thayeri from California and the Pacific coast. A short note should appear soon in the Auk to complete our previous paper. None of these specimens group with our previous "thayeri". None groups with glaucoides or kumlieni either... but with glaucescens.

Now, if you want my opinion at this time, the "white-winged gull" complex is a mess even bigger than the "Herring Gull mess". We need more specimens, and more variable markers (the hypervariable mtDNA segment of Liebers and Helbig would be nice, but we still haven't managed to sequence it on our lab). Iceland (inc. Kumlien's), Thayer's, Glaucous, Glaucous-winged are very closely related. Slaty backed and Vega might very well fall in this group also. They seem to be of even more recent origin than the "Herring Lesser Black backed " group. We have to wait for Helbig's team's results (they still have some paper to publish) and probably try to collect as mush material as we can from this group (you can all help). May be then we can see a bit clearer, although visits to the breeding colonies will always be the best option...

For the relationships of smithsonianus (closer the this "white-winged" group than to the Old World Herring group), this has now been confirmed by additional specimens and other teams (Helbig's among others) and can be now considered as "safe".



Pierre-Andr? Crochet
CEFE-CNRS
1919, route de Mende
34293 Montpellier cedex 5
France
tel: + 33 6 07 32 60 75
fax: + 33 4 67 41 21 38
crochet at cefe.cnrs-mop.fr


-----Message d'origine-----
De?: NBHC ID-FRONTIERS Frontiers of Field Identification [mailto:BIRDWG01 at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU] De la part de Kevin McGowan
Envoy??: lundi 10 novembre 2003 15:23
??: BIRDWG01 at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Objet?: Re: [BIRDWG01] Palest of Thayer's Gulls?

At 05:16 PM 11/8/2003 -0800, Alvaro Jaramillo wrote:

>... The work of Crochet
>et al (2002. Systematics of large white headed gulls: patters of
>mitochondrial DNA variation in western European taxa. Auk 119: 603-620, and
>see references there for earlier work) suggest that glaucoides and thayeri
>are not each other's closest relatives. There are some oddities in the
>patterns found, with Slaty-backed being involved and most closely related
>to glaucoides and kumlieni, but two samples of Slaty-backed showing
>different DNA patterns. Thayer's on the other hand appears to be most
>closely related to Glaucous. ...

This was an excellent paper, but some of the surprising findings were from
limited sample sizes and could use some more corroboration (as the authors
themselves indicated). I found this conclusion about Thayer's Gull to be
particularly suspect. It was based on a single specimen, and that was from
far outside the normal range of the species. I mean, how much do you trust
a "Thayer's Gull" from Louisiana? I suspect the result says more about
Thayer's Gull identification in the middle of the US than it does about
what true Thayer's actually are. I would love to see the genetics done on
all eastern "Thayer's" and compare them to real, West Coast ones to find
out what they really are. That would be an interesting study.

I reserve judgement on these taxa until we get more data. The Crochet et
al. paper has come up with some interesting hypotheses about American gulls
(Thayer's with Glaucous; American Herring separate from European); I can't
wait for the tests.

Kevin




*****************************************************
Kevin J. McGowan
Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology
159 Sapsucker Woods Road
Ithaca, NY 14850
607/254-2432
fax 607/254-2111
kjm2 at cornell.edu
http://birds.cornell.edu/crows/