Dataset Information

Rediscovery of Osteocephalus vilarsi (Anura: Hylidae): an overlooked but widespread Amazonian spiny-backed treefrog.

ABSTRACT: Osteocephalus vilarsi (Melin, 1941) is an Amazonian treefrog species known for over 75 years from its holotype only. Due to a lack of published data on its morphological diagnostic characters and their variations, as well as the absence of molecular, acoustic and ecological data supporting its identity, a highly dynamic taxonomic history has led this species to be confused and even synonymised with other Osteocephalus species from distinct species groups. The molecular phylogenetic relationships of O. vilarsi were investigated based on recently collected specimens from eight Northwestern Brazilian localities in the state of Amazonas, leading to its removal from the Osteocephalus taurinus species group and placement in the Osteocephalus planiceps species group. Furthermore, detailed data on morphology and colour variation are provided, as well as advertisement call and tadpole descriptions. Finally, the currently known geographic range of O. vilarsi is considerably extended, first data on the natural history of the species are provided, and the possible ecological preference of O. vilarsi for Amazonian white-sand forests is discussed.

SUBMITTER: Ferrao M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6898988 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Rediscovery of Osteocephalus vilarsi (Anura: Hylidae): an overlooked but widespread Amazonian spiny-backed treefrog.

Ferrão Miquéias M Moravec Jiří J Moraes Leandro J C L LJCL de Carvalho Vinicius T VT Gordo Marcelo M Lima Albertina P AP

PeerJ 20191204

Osteocephalus vilarsi (Melin, 1941) is an Amazonian treefrog species known for over 75 years from its holotype only. Due to a lack of published data on its morphological diagnostic characters and their variations, as well as the absence of molecular, acoustic and ecological data supporting its identity, a highly dynamic taxonomic history has led this species to be confused and even synonymised with other Osteocephalus species from distinct species groups. The molecular phylogenetic ...[more]

PMID: 31824771

Similar Datasets

Project description:Background:Anuran vocalizations, such as advertisement and release calls, are informative for taxonomy because species recognition can be based on those signals. Thus, a proper acoustic description of the calls may support taxonomic decisions and may contribute to knowledge about amphibian phylogeny. Methods:Here we present a perspective on advertisement call descriptions of the frog subfamily Lophyohylinae, through a literature review and a spatial analysis presenting bioacoustic coldspots (sites with high diversity of species lacking advertisement call descriptions) for this taxonomic group. Additionally, we describe the advertisement and release calls of the still poorly known treefrog, Itapotihyla langsdorffii. We analyzed recordings of six males using the software Raven Pro 1.4 and calculated the coefficient of variation for classifying static and dynamic acoustic properties. Results and Discussion:We found that more than half of the species within the subfamily do not have their vocalizations described yet. Most of these species are distributed in the western and northern Amazon, where recording sampling effort should be strengthened in order to fill these gaps. The advertisement call of I. langsdorffii is composed of 3-18 short unpulsed notes (mean of 13 ms long), presents harmonic structure, and has a peak dominant frequency of about 1.4 kHz. This call usually presents amplitude modulation, with decreasing intensity along the sequence of notes. The release call is a simple unpulsed note with an average duration of 9 ms, and peak dominant frequency around 1.8 kHz. Temporal properties presented higher variations than spectral properties at both intra- and inter-individual levels. However, only peak dominant frequency was static at intra-individual level. High variability in temporal properties and lower variations related to spectral ones is usual for anurans; The first set of variables is determined by social environment or temperature, while the second is usually related to species-recognition process. Here we review and expand the acoustic knowledge of the subfamily Lophyohylinae, highlighting areas and species for future research.

Project description:The Amazonia and the Atlantic Forest, separated by the diagonal of open formations, are two ecoregions that comprise the most diverse tropical forests in the world. The Sphaenorhynchini tribe is among the few tribes of anurans that occur in both rainforests, and their historical biogeographic have never been proposed. In this study, we infer a dated phylogeny for the species of the Sphaenorhynchini and we reconstructed the biogeographic history describing the diversification chronology, and possible patterns of dispersion and vicariance, providing information about how orogeny, forest dynamics and allopatric speciation affected their evolution in South America. We provided a dated phylogeny and biogeography study for the Sphaenorhynchini tribe using mitochondrial and nuclear genes. We analyzed 41 samples to estimate the ancestral areas using biogeographical analysis based on the estimated divergence times and the current geographical ranges of the species of Sphaenorhynchini. We recovered three characteristic clades that we recognize as groups of species (S. lacteus, S. planicola, and S. platycephalus groups), with S. carneus and G. pauloalvini being the sister taxa of all other species from the tribe. We found that the diversification of the tribe lineages coincided with the main climatic and geological factors that shaped the Neotropical landscape during the Cenozoic. The most recent common ancestor of the Sphaenorhynchini species emerged in the North of the Atlantic Forest and migrated to the Amazonia in different dispersion events that occurred during the connections between these ecoregions. This is the first large-scale study to include an almost complete calibrated phylogeny of Sphaenorhynchini, presenting important information about the evolution and diversification of the tribe. Overall, we suggest that biogeographic historical of Sphaenorhynchini have resulted from a combination of repeated range expansion and contraction cycles concurrent with climate fluctuations and dispersal events between the Atlantic Forest and Amazonia.

Dataset Information

Rediscovery of Osteocephalus vilarsi (Anura: Hylidae): an overlooked but widespread Amazonian spiny-backed treefrog.

Publications

Rediscovery of <i>Osteocephalus vilarsi</i> (Anura: Hylidae): an overlooked but widespread Amazonian spiny-backed treefrog.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets