The toco toucan (Ramphastos toco), also known as the common toucan or giant toucan, is a species of bird in the toucan family Ramphastidae. It is the largest species of toucan and has a distinctive appearance, with a black body, a white throat, chest and uppertail-coverts, and red undertail-coverts. Its most conspicuous feature is its massive beak, which is yellow-orange with a black base and large spot on the tip. It is endemic to South America, where it has a wide distribution from the Guianas south to northern Argentina and Uruguay, and its range has recently been expanding southwards. Unlike other toucans, which inhabit continuous forests, toco toucans inhabit a variety of semi-open habitats at altitudes of up to 1,750 m (5,740 ft). They are especially common in the Brazilian cerrado, gallery forests, and the wetlands of the Pantanal.
Toco toucans mainly feed on fleshy fruits, but also supplement their diets with insects, eggs, and nestlings of other birds. They feed on any available sugar-rich fruits, and show a high level of variation in their diet depending on the surrounding habitat. Breeding is seasonal, with the timing of the breeding season differing between regions. Nests are usually made in hollows in trees and contain two to four eggs; both parents incubate the eggs for 17–18 days before hatching. It is considered to be of Least Concern by BirdLife International.
Taxonomy and systematics
The first known European account of the toco toucan was written by the French naturalist Pierre Belon in his 1555 work Histoire de la nature des oyseaux. Belon possessed only a specimen of the bird's bill, and hypothesized that the toucan was a webbed- footed, fish-eating bird due to its long, serrated bill, which Belon thought shared some features with the bills of pelicans, mergansers, and some ducks. Belon's description and ideas remained influential until the eighteenth century.
The species was formally described as Ramphastos Toco by the German zoologist Philipp Ludwig Statius Müller in 1776 on the basis of specimens from Cayenne, French Guiana. In 1862, the German ornithologist Jean Cabanis described R. albogularis as a new species based on specimens from southern Brazil; by 1870, it had been demoted to the status of a subspecies of R. toco. The name of the genus, Ramphastos, derives from a misspelling of the Ancient Greek ῥαμφηστης, rhamphēstēs, meaning snouted, which is itself derived from the Greek ῥαμφη, rhampē, meaning bill; the name refers to the large bill of the toucans. The specific name toco comes from either Tucá or Tucán, the Guarani word for toucan, and may mean "bone-nose". Toco toucan is the official common name designated by the International Ornithologists' Union (IOU). It is called the in Portuguese and the or in Spanish. In Tsimané, an indigenous language spoken in the Bolivian Amazon, it is known as yubibi.
The toco toucan is one of eight species currently placed in the genus Ramphastos, and one of over forty species in the toucan family Ramphastidae. In 1974, the German ornithologist Jürgen Haffer hypothesized that the Ramphastos toucans could be split into two clades (groups of organisms descending from a common ancestor): the "smooth-billed yelpers", comprising the chestnut-mandibled and yellow-throated toucans, and the "channel-keel-billed croakers", comprising the toco, red-breasted, keel-billed, Choco, and channel-billed toucans. He further postulated that the toco toucan was basal (closest to the root of the phylogenetic tree) within the group of channel-keel-billed croakers. Later studies of mitochondrial DNA have largely confirmed the existence of these two clades, but have found the toco toucan to be basal within the family instead of being a part of the channel-keel-billed croakers. The following cladogram shows phylogenetic relationships within Ramphastos, based on a 2009 study by José Patané and colleagues:{ { efn|The study treated the citron-throated toucan (R. citreolaemus) as a subspecies of the channel-billed toucan (R. vitellinus).|group=lower-alpha}}
Subspecies
Two subspecies are recognized by the IOU: R. t. toco Statius Müller, 1776: found in the Guianas, north and northeastern Brazil, and south-eastern Peru. R. t. albogularis Cabanis, 1862: Found in Paraguay, southern and eastern Brazil, northern Bolivia, and northern Argentina. Very similar to the nominate subspecies, but is said to be slightly smaller, with a shorter bill and whiter throat; however, measurements of individuals from both subspecies have found that differences in size are not consistent.