Abstract
We describe a new rainfrog species (Pristimantis), from the wetland complex Oña, Nabón, Saraguro and Yacuambi, in the Andes of southern Ecuador, at altitudes ranging between 3000–3400 m a.s.l. Pristimantis tiktik sp. nov. is a small frog, displaying sexual dimorphism (the males with dorsum of various shades of gray, brown, orange or green and a whitish or pinkish yellow venter; females with brownish gray or gray dorsum and a reticulated white and black venter), with SVL ranging between 19.7–20.4 mm in females (n = 3) and 16.1–18.4 mm in males (n = 6). The skin on dorsum is tuberculated, that on venter is coarsely areolate, dorsolateral folds are absent, tympanic membrane is absent but the tympanic annulus is evident, cranial crests are absent, discs on fingers just slightly expanded, heel is lacking enlarged tubercles, inner edge of tarsus is bearing a long fold, Toe V is slightly longer than Toe III and the iris coloration is bronze with fine black reticulations. The males have a large subgular vocal sac that extends onto the chest and vocal slits but lack nuptial pads. The unique advertisement call consists of long duration series of periodically repeated clicks: “tik”. Molecular analyses place the new species in the recently resurrected P. orestes group, as the sister species of the assemblage that contains P. bambu, P. mazar, P. simonbolivari and an undescribed species.
Highlights
The phylogenetic trees constructed by Bayesian inference and Maximum likelihood showed the same topology, but with the Maximum Likelihood (ML) tree providing usually higher support values at deeper nodes (Fig 1)
In 2008, Hedges et al [34] redefined the group and added 11 Peruvian species to the existing ones from Ecuador: P. atrabracus, P. chimu, P. cordovae, P. corrugatus, P. melanogaster, P. pataikos, P. pinguis, P. seorsus, P. simonsii, P. stictoboubonus, and P. ventriguttatus. The monophyly of this group was rejected by Pinto-Sanchez et al [35] and Padial et al [15], who showed that P. melanogaster and P. simonsii are not part of the group, using in their phylogenetic analyses sequences from the only four species available at that time: P. melanogaster, P. orestes, P. simonbolivari, and P. simonsii
Our phylogenetic analysis recovered the main subdivisions obtained by Padial et al [15] and Brito et al [14] with a strong support, even with higher Bayesian Inference (BI) values compared with the results of Brito et al [14] for the newly defined P. orestes group (Fig 1)
Summary
This study was carried out in strict accordance with the guidelines for use of live amphibians and reptiles in field research compiled by the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, The Herpetologists’ League and the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles. For taxon sampling selection we performed a preliminary maximum likelihood phylogenetic analysis including all 12S and 16S sequences of Pristimantis available from GenBank (489 terminals for 12S and 1260 terminals for 16S), using the MEGA 6 software [20]. We included in our analysis sequences from all the available species from the Pristimantis orestes group (as defined by Brito et al [14]) and 13 closely related species to this group (based on Padial et al [15]). We performed separate maximum likelihood phylogenetic analysis for each one of the genes (using the MEGA 6 software) in order to corroborate our concatenated tree. BI analyses were conducted with MrBayes 3.2.6 [24], the Markov chain Monte Carlo runs being performed twice, first for 66 million generations and second for 65 million generations, with a sampling frequency of 500. The electronic edition of this work was published in a journal with an ISSN, and has been archived and is available from the following digital repositories: PubMed Central and LOCKSS
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