Manx Shearwater - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

At some time or another, every living one of the middle-sized species of Puffinus has been considered a subspecies of P. puffinus. The extant Yelkouan Shearwater and Balearic Shearwater (Sangster et al. 2002), Hutton's Shearwater, Black-vented Shearwater, Townsend's Shearwater, the Hawaiian Shearwater, and the Fluttering Shearwater are now considered good species. Of these, only the Hawaiian and possibly Townsend's Shearwaters seem to be somewhat closely related to the Manx Shearwater (Austin 1996); the former Puffinus puffinus "superspecies" has turned out to be a number of more or less distantly related lineages. However, including the extinct forms listed below, at least the Mediterranean taxa do apparently constitute a superspecies in their own right, and maybe the New Zealand ones also.

Also belonging to this complex seem to be several extinct species:

• Lava Shearwater or Olson's Shearwater, Puffinus olsoni from the Canary Islands, as was
• Hole's Shearwater, Puffinus holeae, which also occurred on the western coasts of Iberia, and
• Scarlett's Shearwater, Puffinus spelaeus of South Island, New Zealand;

undescribed remains found on Menorca may belong to an already-named or a new taxon; they are not from the Balearic Shearwater (Alcover 2001) which is possibly closer to P. holeae than to any other known species, living or extinct. There also existed a Late Pliocene/Early Pleistocene species known from Ibiza, Puffinus nestori, which may have been the direct ancestor of the Mediterranean Shearwater (Heidrich et al. 1998).

The Atlantic forms are parapatric whereas the Pacific forms are sympatric or were not too long ago (Holdaway et al. 2001) and are reproductively isolated by a different circannual rhythm.