Conopoderas caffra dido Murphy and Mathews

LeCroy, M., 2008, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History. Part 7. Passeriformes: Sylviidae, Muscicapidae, Platysteiridae, Maluridae, Acanthizidae, Monarchidae, Rhipiduridae, And Petroicidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 313 (1), pp. 1-287 : 31-32

Conopoderas caffra dido Murphy and Mathews

Conopoderas caffra dido Murphy and Mathews, 1928: 16 (Huapu Island, Marquesas Group).

Now Acrocephalus mendanae dido ( Murphy and Mathews, 1928) . See Watson et al., 1986a: 71, del Hoyo et al., 2006: 630, Cibois et al., 2007, and Cibois et al., 2008.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 190460 , adult male, collected on Ua Pou (5 Huapu) Island, 09.25S, 140.00W (Times Atlas), Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia, on 3 October 1921, by Rollo H. Beck on the Whitney South Sea Expedition (no. 1514).

COMMENTS: The AMNH number of the holotype was given in the original description. The type series was said to include ‘‘Specimens from Huapu collected during October, 1921 and September and November, 1922’’. The following specimens are paratypes: AMNH 190461–190465 and 195421–195453. Of these, AMNH 190465, 195431, 195433, and 195449 were exchanged to the Rothschild Collection, and when AMNH purchased that collection, they were renumbered 594923, 594921, 594920, and 594922, respectively. I did not find AMNH 195426, 195428, 195429, 195438, and 195445 in the collection, and they may have been exchanged to other institutions without the catalog having been so marked.

Dickinson (2003: 585) listed dido as a subspecies of A. caffer and referenced other treatments. Recent mtDNA studies by Cibois et al. (2007) showed that Marquesan populations of Acrocephalus were polyphyletic. Their proposed classification included dido in Acrocephalus mendanae .