Todiramphus cinnamominus · mitochondrial ND2 · 156 sequences
Every kingfisher sequence ever deposited, plotted by how far its ND2 gene has drifted from the Guam kingfisher. The bird sits at the centre. The ring around it is empty — not sparse, empty. This chart inks the emptiness and leaves the data as dust.
MG008164, on a
square-root scale, so an empty annulus covers page area in proportion to the
distance interval it spans — the voids are honestly sized, not dramatised.
Angle = tip order in the maximum-likelihood tree, so clades stay contiguous
around the circle. Inked annuli are intervals containing no sequence at all.
Hover a mark, or arrow-key through the chart, for its identity. The label stays for two seconds after you move away, so you can click the species name in it to open that bird on Wikipedia; the marks and the table names are links too. A dotted underline means the article covers the parent species, because the subspecies has none of its own.
| Species | Accession | Subfamily | Distance % | Sites |
|---|
The sihek's three sequenced individuals differ from each other by 0.10–0.29%. The nearest other kingfisher on Earth is 2.30% away. Between those two numbers lie 2.02 percentage points in which nothing exists — not one of the other 155 sequences, across every genus in the family.
That is the innermost ring. Ink the same way everywhere and the whole family turns out to be built of them: a second void at 3.84–5.67% walling off the core Todiramphus radiation, and a 4.38-point chasm at 8.02–12.39% separating the genus from every other kingfisher. Radiations leave gaps. This one happens to have a bird standing alone in the middle of it.
A moat is not a measure of age, and this one is drawn from a single maternally inherited gene. ND2 traces the matriline only; introgression and incomplete lineage sorting are both plausible in an island archipelago, and a genome-scale study of the genus found that nuclear and mitochondrial data give no concordant topology at all.
Nor does the picture resolve which lineage the sihek split from. Its apparent sister on the tree, T. recurvirostris, carries only 66% bootstrap support. The isolation is solid; the ancestry is not.