Acrulocercus bishopi Rothschild

Mary, 2011, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 9. Passeriformes: Zosteropidae And Meliphagidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2011 (348), pp. 1-193 : 139

Acrulocercus bishopi Rothschild

Acrulocercus bishopi Rothschild, 1893a: 41 (Island of Molokai).

Now Moho bishopi (Rothschild, 1893) . See Salomonsen, 1967: 425, Dickinson, 2003: 431, Higgins et al., 2008: 499–500, and Fleischer et al., 2008.

LECTOTYPE: AMNH 693923 , male, collected on Molokai Island , ca. 22.00N, 157.00W, Hawaii, on 26 December 1892, by H.C. Palmer (no. 1891). From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Rothschild did not designate a type in the original description but provid- ed descriptions of male and female. AMNH 693923 (Palmer no. 1891) is marked ‘‘s Type’’ and was listed as the type by Hartert (1919a: 177), thereby designating it the lectotype of bishopi .

Rothschild (1893 b, 1900: Di 16–17, 225– 226) gave further information and some details of the discovery of this species by H.C. Palmer, who collected widely for Rothschild in the Hawaiian Islands. Palmer found this species in small numbers in December and January; he left Molokai on 25 February 1893 and returned to Honolulu, from which place he probably shipped the specimens to Rothschild. Thus, Rothschild most likely would have had in hand all of the specimens of bishopi collected in December 1892 and January 1893. The total number of specimens was not given, but the nine paralectotypes of bishopi in AMNH are: eight males, AMNH 693916 (Palmer no. 1949), 26 January 1893, AMNH 693917 (1940), 22 January 1893, AMNH 693918 (1941), 22 January 1893, AMNH 693919 (1948), 26 January 1893, AMNH 693920 (1946), 26 January 1893, AMNH 693921 (1922), 14 January 1893, AMNH 693922 (1865), 17 December 1892, AMNH 693924 (1918), 6 January 1893; two females, AMNH 693925 (1929), 14 January 1893, AMNH 693926 (1908), undated. The label of AMNH 693926 is marked ‘‘ ♀ Type.’’ It was last seen on Molokai in 1904 and is now considered extinct ( Garrensen et al., 2009: 112). The illustration of this species on the cover is from Rothschild (1900: pl. 74, opp. p. 225) and illustrates the male and female ‘‘types.’’

Based on analysis of DNA from museum specimens, Fleischer et al. (2008) found that Moho species are unrelated to meliphagids, with which they have been associated since their discovery. They proposed a new family, Mohoidae , to include the genera Moho and Chaetoptila .