Pionus, Wagler, 1832

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 : 35

Pionus

Pionus comprises a small radiation mostly predominantly either green or bronze-green and blue, midsized parrots with square tails that are distributed from Mexico to Argentina and southern Brazil ( Forshaw and Knight, 2010). Pionus has a crown age of 4.5 Mya (2.3–6.3), a temporal span that overlaps the estimated ages of Ribas et al. (2007a), but the phylogenomic ages are younger. There was considerable topological disagreement between the phylogenomic trees and a previously published mtDNA tree of Pionus (2007a). Immediate sister pairs ( P. senilis / P. chalcopterus ; P. seniloides / P. tumultuosus ; and P. maximiliani / P. sordidus ) are consistent across all trees, but most other nodes differ. The widely distributed Pionus menstruus was included in the present study but not in Smith et al. (2023), due to a sampling error detected prior to that work’s publication. Pionus fuscus of the Guianan Shield and adjoining parts of Amazonia is exceptional in the genus in lacking green in its otherwise predominantly brown, blue and red plumage. Both of these species are in unresolved positions in the concatenated tree. Pionus fuscus was strongly supported as sister to P. senilis and P. chalcopterus in the concatenated tree in Smith et al. (2023). However, the inclusion of P. menstruus in this study destabilized the position of P. fuscus . This may be due in part to our P. menstruus coming from a historical museum specimen. The species tree had P. fuscus as sister to P. seniloides and P. tumultuosus (LPP = 1.0). Ribas et al. (2007a) had a third alternative topology, and placed P. fuscus as sister to P. sordidus and P. maximiliani , and P. menstruus as sister to P. chalcopterus and P. senilis . The disparity between the concatenated and species trees presented here was illuminating in that all nodes are supported in the species tree and all internal nodes differ. Another distinction between studies was that Ribas et al. (2007a) included samples of subspecies, which showed deep divergences within species (e.g., P. sordidus ). Subsequent phylogeographic research on Pionus senilis of Mexico and Central America found genetic structure across its range that coalesces to 1.3 Mya ( Rivera-Arroyo et al., 2022). Future work with more extensive genome-level sampling will be necessary to resolve the high phylogenetic discordance observed in Pionus .