Acknowledgements
We thank Terry Chesser and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial
Research Organization of Australia for providing samples of the royal
spoonbills and Carrie K.W. Ma for providing samplings of black-faced
spoonbills from Hong Kong. We are grateful for the valuable help and
comments by Chih-Ming Hong, Wei Liang, Teng-Chiu Lin, and Benyang Liao.
We are in debt to Alan Watson who has greatly improved the readability
of this manuscript. This work was supported by grants to C.- T. Yao from
the Taiwan Endemic Species Research Institute and to S.-H. Li from the
Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C., and Y. Liu by
Forestry Administration of Guangdong Province, China (DFGP Project of
Fauna of Guangdong-202115. It was also kindly supported by endorsement
from Mr. Y.-C. Chen.
Author contributions : S.-H.L., C.-T.Y. and Y.L. designed
research; C.-F.Y., and Y.C.C. performed research; W.-Y.K., T.H.K, and
F.-T. C. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; C.-F.Y., C.C.C., , and
Y.C.C., analyzed data; and S.-H.L., Y.L. C.K.L.Y., C.-C.L., Y.F., and
C.-T.Y. wrote the paper. All authors approved the final submission.
Competing interests : The authors declare that they have no
competing interests.