Parvipsitta, Mathews, 1916

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 : 71-72

Parvipsitta and Psitteuteles

Parvipsitta comprises two Australian species, one of which ( P. pusilla ) is green with some red about the bill. As such, it closely resembles a number of other species now in newly circumscribed Vini , thus indicating the likely plesiomorphic nature of this predominantly green plumage with some facial red. Parvipsitta porphyrocephala in contrast has a more complex pattern of bluish underparts and purple crown, orange ear-coverts, and red underwing. It is the only lorikeet to range extensively into semiarid and arid zone habitats.

Psitteuteles now comprises just one species, Ps. versicolor , of tropical northern Australia. Predominantly green, it has a mauve chest and red crown, striated underparts, and a prominent naked, white periophthalmic ring.

Parvipsitta and Psitteuteles are deeply divergent lineages subject to previous reclassification ( Schweizer et al., 2015). Although the distinction between Parvipsitta and Psitteuteles might be considered arbitrary, we reiterate the conclusions of Joseph et al. (2020) that placing all three species in Psitteuteles would form a very highly heterogeneous and differentiated group. Parvipsitta and Psitteuteles diverged from each other in the Pliocene at 7.3 Mya (2.1–11) and Pa. pusilla and Pa. porphyrocephala share a common ancestor dating back to 6.1 Mya (1.8–9.2; fig. 14). The three species are distinct in plumage, vocalization, and have nonoverlapping ranges in semiarid or mesic woodlands in Australia. For these reasons as well as to minimize nomenclatural change, we advocate their retention in Parvipsitta (cf. Pseudeos fuscata and Ps. cardinalis below). Psitteuteles versicolor of northern Australia, Pa. pusilla of eastern Australia, and Pa. porphyrocephala of southern and western Australia each exhibit no known geographic variation, a pattern observed in numerous highly vagile lorikeets that do not exhibit disjointed ranges caused by topographic or oceanic barriers. Network analysis of mtDNA also indicated that geographic genetic structure was lacking in Pa. porphyrocephala ( Dolman and Joseph, 2015) .

Chalcopsitta , Pseudeos , and Cardeos

Chalcopsitta are large lories with midlength tails and atypical colors. The three species in Chalcopsitta ( atra , scintillata , and duivenbodei ) occur in the New Guinea lowlands and some adjacent islands. We follow Beehler and Pratt (2016) in using the emended spelling of the epithet scintillata despite its introduction as Psittacus sintillatus . Chalcopsitta scintillata has generally green body plumage that is heavily striated yellowish, similar to Synorhacma multistriata and Psitteuteles versicolor . Apart from a red forecrown in adults, however, its head plumage is largely dark to black. Apart from the black crown of some Lorius and melanic individuals of Charmosyna stellae , this is not observed in the Loriini outside Chalcopsitta . Even more distinct is the nearly entirely black C. atra (save for yellow and red undertail in some populations) and the brown, yellow, and purple C. duivenbodei (which has very prominent yellow underwings). Relationships among the three species are consistent and well supported (fig. 14). Chalcopsitta duivenbodei was sister to C. atra and C. scintillata . The crown age of Chalcopsitta is 3.7 Mya (0.9–6.0; fig. 14).

Pseudeos and Cardeos both comprise single species and have been recently treated as congeneric ( Joseph et al., 2020). We will argue below that separation into two genera can be justified. They are both characterized by extensive red or orange in their plumage.

Prior molecular work showed that Pseudeos cardinalis , long placed without comment in Chalcopsitta , is more closely related to Pseudeos fuscata than to the three species of its former genus, Chalcopsitta ( Schweizer et al., 2015) . Our phylogenomic work confirms this result, but the species tree showed Pseudeos cardinalis as sister to Chalcopsitta , and P.fuscata as sister to the whole clade (fig. 14). The phylogenetic discordance can be explained in part by the short internodal distance spanning the mean divergence between Chalcopsitta and Pseudeos at just 0.6 Mya with almost largely overlapping temporal ranges from the bootstrapped trees. The split between Chalcopsitta and Pseudeos was estimated at 6.7 Mya (2–10.3) and the divergence within Pseudeos was 6.1 Mya (1.9–9.5; fig. 14).

Concerning plumage traits in these five species, we stress the caveat of not giving undue taxonomic significance to similarities and differences. A general pattern of evolution in parrots, especially “radiations” of closely related species, is that relatively high diversity can evolve quickly under a range of evolutionary forces ( Merwin et al., 2020). With that proviso, we make the following observations.

Pseudeos show atypical plumage patterns and indeed colors not only for lorikeets but for parrots generally (e.g., the peculiar light greenish rump color in Pseudeos fuscata unique in all Psittaciformes except perhaps a similar but not necessarily homologous color in Poicephalus meyeri , Psephotellus dissimilis , and P. chrysopterygius ). The more uniformly “cardinal” red species cardinalis , recently transferred to Pseudeos but whose generic status we investigate here, is distinct from all species within the Chalcopsitta / Pseudeos clade, most strikingly from its closest relative, P. fuscata . The most common plumage in P.fuscata is a combination of brown, black, and orange, but it has a polymorphic plumage in which yellow largely replaces orange. Research into the pigment(s) underlying these colors in the two species of Pseudeos would be most interesting, e.g., are they all due to modified expression of psittacofulvins, the pigment underlying pigment-based red-to-yellow hues in parrots ( McGraw and Nogare, 2004)? Striated plumage patterning is absent in Pseudeos whereas in Chalcopsitta all three species share unique nuchal streaking. Further, among all five of these species only C. scintillata is ventrally streaked, the ventral barring in the other four presumably an ancestral trait. Figure 15 illustrates these traits.

Concerning other characters, we note that in Pseudeos (including cardinalis ) bill color is orange, or orange and black, whereas in Chalcopsitta it is black. The species cardinalis has an apparently autapomorphic trait of bare yellow skin around the base of the mandible. This skin of course is dark in museum specimens (fig. 15). Gross body size is disparate within both Chalcopsitta and Pseudeos sensu lato, with P. fuscata and C. scintillata the smaller species in their respective genus and the other three ( atra , duivenbodei , and cardinalis ) similarly large (see fig. 15). Lastly here, we note that P. cardinalis is endemic to a major center of avian endemism, the Solomon Islands.

In contrast to our earlier position ( Provost et al., 2018; Joseph et al., 2020), we here acknowledge the collective weight of available genomic data coupled with biogeographic evidence and phenotypic data (notwithstanding the lability of color evolution in lorikeets) that warrants placement of cardinalis in monotypic Cardeos Verheyen, 1956. We acknowledge that the temporal divergence between Cardeos cardinalis and Pseudeos fuscata closely matches that between the two species of Parvipsitta , but we do not advocate generic separation of the latter. Very different biogeographical patterns and contexts apply in the two groups and we argue that the generic taxonomy should capture this.