Methodology for Comparison of vocal and molecular phylogeny in songbirds Case study: family Muscicapidea

Birds as a vertebrate which showed a high variety of sounds have a specialized organ sound production, the syrinx. Muscicapidea as one group of Songbirds of Passeriformes are seen in the diverse habitats which have a high ability not only in learning but also in imitating sounds. Surely acoustic studies beside the molecular studies would be useful for clarifying the phylogenetic relationship among the members of this problematic family. In this study, we analyzed the Song of 40 species of this family using Raven Pro version 1.5 software. For this dataset seven vocal characters were defined and finally the NJ and UPGMA were constructed using the Phylip 3.60 and PAUP 4.0 software respectively. The results almost demonstrated total incongruence between vocal and molecular phylogeny. In general, we find 62 and 45 percent congruence between constructed tree of NJ and UPGMA and accepted molecular phylogeny respectively.