Three For The Price Of One: Genomics Reveals Three Distinct Cockatoo Species

An international collaboration of scientists have made a groundbreaking discovery that could positively impact the conservation of three iconic yellow-crested white cockatoo species

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Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, Cacatua galerita, Risdon Brook Park, Tasmania, Australia. (Credit: JJ Harrison / CC BY-SA 3.0)

“In the end, we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we are taught.”

― Baba Dioum (1937 — current)

A recent deep dive into the genomics of several cockatoo taxa by an international team of scientists has revealed these parrots comprise three distinct species — not subspecies, as often claimed. Until now, whole-genome research had not been carried out on any of these cockatoo species and thus, their taxonomy is rather messy, leaving people to distinguish between them solely on the basis of the parrots’ subtle — and often overlapping — physical differences.

This confusion is particularly concerning because one of these three cryptic species is critically endangered: the yellow-crested cockatoo population of New Guinea has only 2,000 individuals remaining in the wild.