Beyond phylogeny: pelecaniform and ciconiiform birds, and long-term niche stability

• Mitochondrial genome analyses of Pelecaniformes, Ciconiiformes and allies.
• Group has occupied a water carnivore role for tens of millions of years.
• Most comprehensive analysis of water-carnivores and relatives to date.
• Diverged from shorebird water-carnivores about 70 Ma, before the K/Pg boundary.
• Good phylogenetic agreement between nuclear and mitochondrial data.

Phylogenetic trees are a starting point for the study of further evolutionary and ecological questions. We show that for avian evolutionary relationships, improved taxon sampling, longer sequences and additional data sets are giving stability to the prediction of the grouping of pelecaniforms and ciconiiforms, thus allowing inferences to be made about long-term niche occupancy. Here we report the phylogeny of the pelecaniform birds and their water-carnivore allies using complete mitochondrial genomes, and show that the basic groupings agree with nuclear sequence phylogenies, even though many short branches are not yet fully resolved. In detail, we show that the Pelecaniformes (minus the tropicbird) and the Ciconiiformes (storks, herons and ibises) form a natural group within a seabird water-carnivore clade. We find pelicans are the closest relatives of the shoebill (in a clade with the hammerkop), and we confirm that tropicbirds are not pelecaniforms. In general, the group appears to be an adaptive radiation into an ‘aquatic carnivore’ niche that it has occupied for 60–70 million years. From an ecological and life history perspective, the combined pelecaniform–ciconiform group is more informative than focusing on differences in morphology. These findings allow a start to integrating molecular evolution and macroecology.

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