I took part in the International Barcoding Conference in Guelph last July, and
was until recently (retired now) a member of the Norwegian Barcoding Committee.
So I can vouch for the great promise of this method, even though for the time
being we have to do it the hard way and the nifty little 'barcoding machine' is
very much a thing of the future as yet. Australia is part of the large new
programme, and Les Christidis was present in Guelph.
But for large gulls the method has until now generated little light. Both in
N.America and in Norway most of the taxa of large white-headed gulls have been
barcoded (The American data have been published, but I do not have the
reference at hand, recently having had to move both at home and at he office;
while the Norwegian data, by Jan Lifjeld, are I think as yet unpublished). In
both cases , more than 90% of the currently recognized bird species of the area
had a unique barcode; the other species belonged to two different groups. 1)
Those where there were large intraspecific differences, and 2) those were there
were small interspecific differences. In the first group there are species,
such as Myrtle and Audubon Warblers, where the eastern and western populations
turn out to have a quite different barcode. Similar cases are some woodpeckers
and owls, where currentkly Eurasian and american populations are reckoned to
belong to the same species, but where the barcodes show clear differences. In
the second group it turns out that e.g. all redpoll species have more or less
the same barcode, and the same, much more surprisingly, goes for Common and
King Eider! And all the large white-headed gulls have almost exactly the same
barcode!! Of course, the barcoding segment is only a very small part of the
total DNA, and one may expect other parts to show netter differences. However,
earlier genetic studies in germany of Herring and Lesser Black-backed Gulls
showed very few differences also in large parts of the DNA. So I fear that the
Cooktown gull in the end needs to be identified using the classic morphological
characters; barcoding won't help, and DNA may also be of little help.
Wim Vader, Tromsø Museum
9037 Tromsø, Norway
==============================www.birding-aus.org
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