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RECENT SPECIATION BETWEEN THE BALTIMORE ORIOLE AND THE BLACK-BACKED ORIOLE

2004; Oxford University Press; Volume: 106; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1650/7496

1938-5129

Beatrice Kondo, Jason M. Baker, Kevin E. Omland,

Identification and Quantification in Food

A recent phylogenetic survey of the New World orioles (genus Icterus; Omland et al. 1999) suggested that the Baltimore Oriole (I. galbula) and the Black-backed Oriole (I. abeillei) are sister taxa. That survey examined mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from a single representative of each species in the genus. Here, we examine mtDNA sequences from 15 Black-backed and 20 Baltimore Orioles. The two species appear to be very recently diverged, with average sequence divergences for both cytochrome b (cyt b) and the control region indicating a probable late Pleistocene split. Despite this very recent divergence, there is one fixed base-pair difference between the species in cyt b and another in the control region, suggesting that one or both species have undergone a bottleneck during or since speciation. This molecular evidence of recent divergence suggests that male plumage differences between Black-backed and Baltimore Orioles evolved very rapidly.