Species delimitation in frogs from South American temperate forests: The case of Eupsophus, a taxonomically complex genus with high phenotypic variation

One of the most characteristic and abundant amphibian taxa of South American temperate forests is Eupsophus. The ten currently recognized species of the genus have been divided in two species groups, roseus and vertebralis, but most of them, eight, belong to the roseus group. Recent phylogeographic...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2017-08, Vol.12 (8), p.e0181026-e0181026
Main Authors: Correa, Claudio, Vásquez, Dayana, Castro-Carrasco, Camila, Zúñiga-Reinoso, Álvaro, Ortiz, Juan Carlos, Palma, R Eduardo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Amphibians
Analysis
Animals
Anura
Anura - classification
Anura - genetics
Bayes Theorem
Bayesian analysis
Biodiversity
Biology and Life Sciences
Computer and Information Sciences
Conservation
Diagnostic systems
Differentiation
Distribution
Earth Sciences
Ecology and Environmental Sciences
Environmental aspects
Eupsophus altor
Eupsophus calcaratus
Eupsophus contulmoensis
Eupsophus emiliopugini
Eupsophus insularis
Eupsophus migueli
Eupsophus nahuelbutensis
Eupsophus roseus
Eupsophus septentrionalis
Eupsophus vertebralis
Forests
Frogs
Genetic distance
Genetic Speciation
Group dynamics
Hylidae
Mitochondria
Morphology
People and places
Phenotype
Phenotypic variations
Phylogenetics
Phylogeny
Physical Sciences
Populations
Reptiles & amphibians
Sequence Analysis, DNA
South America
Species diversity
Species Specificity
Taxa
Taxonomy
Temperate forests
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Summary:One of the most characteristic and abundant amphibian taxa of South American temperate forests is Eupsophus. The ten currently recognized species of the genus have been divided in two species groups, roseus and vertebralis, but most of them, eight, belong to the roseus group. Recent phylogeographic and phylogenetic studies have suggested that species diversity of the roseus group could be underestimated. An examination of the literature shows that species of the roseus group exhibit high levels of variation in their external characteristics, particularly those used as diagnostic characters, which compromises their taxonomy and hinders their field recognition. High levels of variation were also observed in several new populations of the roseus group discovered in southern Chile (36°-40°S), which could not be identified to the species level by their external characteristics. On the other hand, the literature reveals a scarse karyotype differentiation and a high bioacoustic uniformity among the species of the roseus group. We performed a Bayesian phylogenetic analysis using mitochondrial and nuclear genes to reevaluate the species diversity of the roseus group, including all the nominal species of Eupsophus and new populations. This analysis was complemented with three species delimitation approaches, General Mixed Yule Coalescent, multi-rate Poisson Tree Process and Automatic Barcode Gap Discovery. We favored a conservative delimitation of only four species for the roseus group, a result more consistent with the distribution of pairwise genetic distances, and the available chromosome and bioacoustic evidence. The four recognized lineages, which have nearly completely allopatric distributions, are named after the earliest nominal species that they include, but because high levels of phenotypic variation, they are not diagnosable by consistent differences in external morphology. We discuss the implications of this new proposal for the taxonomy and conservation of the genus, and the possible causes of the difficulty to estimate its species diversity.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0181026