Descriptions of the tadpoles of seven species of Malagasy treefrogs, genus Boophis

Abstract

The genus Boophis is a species-rich group of treefrogs within the family Mantellidae Laurent, endemic to Madagascar. The larval morphology of these frogs is an important trait to understand the evolution of reproductive modes and larval morphologies in the mantellid radiation and can provide important information to compare adaptations of tadpoles and adults, and elucidate possible covariation, and convergent evolution of these traits. We here assign seven previously unknown or insufficiently described Boophis tadpoles to species via DNA barcoding, and provide detailed morphological descriptions based mainly on the unambiguously identified DNA voucher specimens. All described tadpoles are stream-adapted, exotrophic tadpoles of a relatively generalized morphology. Applying our previous classification for stream-breeding Boophis based on relative oral disk width and the number of papillae and keratodonts we attempt an assignment of all species into ecomorphological guilds. Our results show that this previous definition of guilds (in Boophis) based on only three characters was an oversimplification, and that the variation in these tadpoles is more complex. In a phylogenetic context we found that species within at least two species groups of Boophis are heterogeneous in their assignment to the ecomorphological guilds confirming the probable non-monophyly of these groups.