Microcarbo

Microcarbo is a genus of fish-eating birds, known as cormorants, of the family Phalacrocoracidae. The genus was formerly subsumed within Phalacrocorax.

Microcarbo
Little pied cormorant Microcarbo melanoleucos
Scientific classification
Domain:	Eukaryota
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Order:	Suliformes
Family:	Phalacrocoracidae
Genus:	Microcarbo Bonaparte, 1856
Type species
Pelecanus pygmaeus (pygmy cormorant) Pallas, 1773
Species
See text
Synonyms
Nanocorax (in part)

Microcarbo has been recognized as a valid genus by the IOC's World Bird List^[1] on the basis of work by Siegel-Causey (1988), Kennedy et al. (2000), and Christidis and Boles (2008).

As suggested by the name, this genus contains the smallest of the world's cormorants. It is also the most basal, having diverged from the rest of the family between 12.8 to 15.4 million years ago.^[2]

Taxonomy

The genus Microcarbo was introduced in 1856 by the French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte with the pygmy cormorant as the type species.^[3][4] The name combines the Ancient Greek mikros meaning "small" with the genus name Carbo that was introduced by Bernard Germain de Lacépède in 1789.^[5]

The genus contains five species.^[1]

List of species

Genus Microcarbo – Bonaparte, 1856 – five species

Common name	Scientific name and subspecies	Range	Size and ecology	IUCN status and estimated population
Crowned cormorant	Microcarbo coronatus (Wahlberg,, 1855)	Cape Agulhas north to Swakopmund along the coast of southern Africa	Size: Habitat: Diet:	LC
Little cormorant	Microcarbo niger (Vieillot, 1817)	Indian Subcontinent east to Java	Size: Habitat: Diet:	LC
Little pied cormorant	Microcarbo melanoleucos (Vieillot, 1817) Three subspecies M. m. melanoleucos. M. m. brevicauda Mayr 1931. M. m. brevirostris Gould 1837	New Zealand, from Stewart Island to Northland, mainland Australia, Tasmania and Indonesia	Size: Habitat: Diet:	LC
Pygmy cormorant	Microcarbo pygmaeus (, )	south-east of Europe (east of Italy) and south-west of Asia, in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan	Size: Habitat: Diet:	LC
Reed cormorant	Microcarbo africanus (Gmelin, JF, 1789) Two subspecies M. a. africanus (Gmelin, JF, 1789) M. a. pictilis (Bangs, 1918)	Africa south of the Sahara, and Madagascar	Size: Habitat: Diet:	LC

• †Serventys' cormorant, Microcarbo serventyorum

References

1. Gill, Frank; Donsker, David; Rasmussen, Pamela, eds. (August 2021). "Storks, frigatebirds, boobies, darters, cormorants". IOC World Bird List Version 12.2. International Ornithologists' Union. Retrieved 19 November 2022.
2. Kennedy, Martyn; Spencer, Hamish G. (2014-10-01). "Classification of the cormorants of the world". Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. 79: 249–257. Bibcode:2014MolPE..79..249K. doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2014.06.020. ISSN 1055-7903. PMID 24994028.
3. Bonaparte, Charles Lucien (1856). "Excusion dans les divers Musées d'Allemagne, de Hollande et de Belgique, et tableaux paralléliques de l'ordre des échassiers (suite)". Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l'Académie des Sciences (in French). 43: 571–579 [577].
4. Mayr, Ernst; Cottrell, G. William, eds. (1979). Check-List of Birds of the World. Vol. 1 (2nd ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Museum of Comparative Zoology. p. 163.
5. Jobling, James A. (2010). The Helm Dictionary of Scientific Bird Names. London: Christopher Helm. p. 253. ISBN 978-1-4081-2501-4.

• Christidis, L., and W. E. Boles. 2008. Systematics and taxonomy of Australian birds. CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, Victoria, Australia.
• Kennedy, M., R. D. Gray, and H. G. Spencer. 2000. The phylogenetic relationships of the shags and cormorants: can sequence data resolve a disagreement between behavior and morphology? Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 17: 345–359.
• Siegel-Causey, D. 1988. Phylogeny of the Phalacrocoracidae. Condor 90: 885–905. Available at (Accessed 13 May 2010).