Ara, Lacepede, 1799

Smith, Brian Tilston, Thom, Gregory & Joseph, Leo, 2024, Revised Evolutionary And Taxonomic Synthesis For Parrots (Order: Psittaciformes) Guided By Phylogenomic Analysis, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2024 (468), pp. 1-87 : 46

Ara

Ara contains the other group of extant large-bodied brightly colored macaws, and we note that at least one smaller species, A. tricolor , is extinct ( Forshaw and Knight, 2017). Ara has a crown age of 6.4 Mya (2.8–9.2), and maximum likelihood divergence time estimates among species in the genus ranged from 1.7–6.4 Mya (fig. 9). Relationships within Ara differ between the concatenated and species tree and relative to previously inferred trees. All trees support three different groups, but relationships among and within them vary. One group comprises four species, the two large red ( A. macao and A. chloropterus ) and two large green macaws ( A. militaris and A. ambiguus ). A phylogenetic study on Ara using mitochondrial DNA with incomplete species-level placed the extinct A. tricolor as sister to the red and green macaws ( Johansson et al., 2018). The second group is the closely related blue-and-yellow macaws ( A. glaucogularis and A. ararauna ), our data robustly affirming the species status of A. glaucogularis (see Ingels et al., 1981; Hesse and Duffield, 2000) and the phenotypically distinct A. rubrogenys , which was not included in previous phylogenetic studies. The third group consisted solely of A. severus . In the phylogenomic trees, A. severus was sister to all other Ara . The concatenated and species trees differed with respect to the monophyly of the large green and red macaws. Only the concatenated tree showed that the red ( A. macao and A. chloropterus ) and green macaws ( A. militaris and A. ambiguus ) were respectively monophyletic for each color group (fig. 9). Phylogeographic studies have found genetic structuring across the ranges of A. macao ( Schmidt et al., 2020; Aardema et al., 2023), and A. militaris ( Eberhard et al., 2015, Rivera-Ortíz et al., 2023), and no structuring in A. ambiguus . The critically endangered A. glaucogularis of Bolivia shows weak genetic differentiation between northern and southern populations ( Campos et al., 2021).