Bald gull
The division of living beings into systematics is a continuous subject of research. Different systematic classifications exist side by side and one after the other. The taxon treated here has become obsolete due to new research or is not part of the group systematics presented in the German-language Wikipedia.
As the white-headed gull ( Larus cachinnans ), several great gull taxa were temporarily grouped together, which were previously considered to be subspecies of the herring gull . All of them have yellow legs in their adult dress ; In contrast, the herring gull has flesh-colored legs. In the youth dress, however, they sometimes appear very "white-headed", which is where the name comes from. At the turn of the millennium, however, it was established on the basis of genetic studies that the “white-headed gull” is a paraphyletic taxon. The taxa michahellis and armenicus are more closely related to the herring gull, while cachinnans is related to the herring gull and the American herring gull .
Today the former subspecies are regarded as separate species . The scientific name only refers to the steppe gull:
- Mediterranean seagull ( Larus michahellis )
- Armenian Gull ( Larus armenicus )
- Steppe gull ( Larus cachinnans )
There is also a yellow-legged variety of the herring gull in the Baltic Sea region, which is sometimes known as Larus c. omissus to the "white headed gull" was placed. Today, however, this population is almost extinct due to mixing with birds of more western origin and yellow-legged specimens are now quite rare.
literature
- Klaus Malling Olsen, Hans Larsson: Gulls of Europe, Asia and North America , Helm Identification Guides, Christopher Helm, London 2003 (corrected new edition from 2004), ISBN 978-0-7136-7087-5
- Urs N. Glutz von Blotzheim , KM Bauer : Handbook of the birds of Central Europe . Volume 8 / I: Charadriiformes. 3rd part: snipe, gull and alken birds. AULA-Verlag, ISBN 3-923527-00-4 .
- Lars Svensson , Peter J. Grant, Killian Mullarney, Dan Zetterström: The new cosmos bird guide . Kosmos, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-440-07720-9 .
- Pierre-Andre Crochet, Jean-Dominique Lebreton, Francois Bonhomme: Systematics of large white-headed gulls: Patterns of mitochondrial DNA variation in western European taxa , The Auk 119 (3), 2002, pp. 603-620
- M. Gottschling: A difficult case: Mediterranean gull and steppe gull. In: The falcon. 51. 2004, pp. 148-155. Full text as pdf (256 KB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Olsen / Larsson, p. 262f, s. literature