Conopoderas caffra fatuhivae Murphy and Mathews

LeCroy, M., 2008, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History. Part 7. Passeriformes: Sylviidae, Muscicapidae, Platysteiridae, Maluridae, Acanthizidae, Monarchidae, Rhipiduridae, And Petroicidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 313 (1), pp. 1-287 : 31

Conopoderas caffra fatuhivae Murphy and Mathews

Conopoderas caffra fatuhivae Murphy and Mathews, 1928: 14 (Fatuhiva Island, Marquesas Group).

Now Acrocephalus mendanae fatuhivae ( Murphy and Mathews, 1928) . See Watson et al., 1986a: 71, del Hoyo et al., 2006: 630, Cibois et al., 2007, and Cibois et al., 2008.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 195588 , adult male, collected on Fatu Hiva Island , 10.27S, 138.39W (Times Atlas), Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia, on 30 November 1922, by Rollo H. Beck on the Whitney South Sea Expedition (no. 6588).

COMMENTS: The AMNH number of the holotype was given in the original description. The description was based on ‘‘Specimens from Fatuhiva collected during November and December, 1922’’. The following specimens are paratypes: AMNH 195582– 195587 and 195589–195611. Of these, AMNH 195586, 195603, and 195611 were exchanged with the Rothschild Collection, and when that collection was purchased by AMNH, they were recataloged as AMNH 594913, 594915, and 594914, respectively. AMNH 195599 was ‘‘Taken by Mr. Morden to Acad. Sci. Leningrad July 1929 ’’. AMNH 195589, 195597, 195602, 195606, and 195610 are not now in the AMNH collection and may have been exchanged with other institutions, although the catalog is not so marked.

Dickinson (2003: 585) listed fatuhivae as a subspecies of A. caffer and referenced other treatments. Recent mtDNA studies by Cibois et al. (2007) indicated nonmonophyly among populations of Acrocephalus in the Marquesas. Their proposed classification includes fatuhivae in the species A. mendanae .