Abstract
Measurements of historical specimens are widely applied in studies of taxonomy, systematics, and ecology, but biologists often assume that the effects of preservative chemicals on the morphology of amphibian specimens are minimal in their analyses. We compared the body length and body mass of 182 samples of 13 live and preserved (up to 10 years) anuran species and found that the body length and body mass of preserved specimens significantly decreased by 6.1% and 24.8%, respectively, compared to those measurements of their live counterparts. The changes in body length and mass also exhibited highly significant variations between species. Similarly, there were significant differences in shrinkage of body length and body mass between sexes, where males showed greater shrinkage in body length and body mass compared to females. Preservation distorted the magnitude of the interspecific differences in body length observed in the fresh specimens. Overall, the reduction in body length or mass was greater in longer or heavier individuals. Due to the effects of preservation on amphibian morphology, we propose two parsimonious conversion equations to back-calculate the original body length and body mass of studied anurans for researchers working with historical data, since morphological data from preserved specimens may lead to incorrect biological interpretations when comparing to fresh specimens. Therefore, researchers should correct for errors due to preservation effects that may lead to the misinterpretation of results.
Highlights
Common preservative chemicals, such as formalin and ethanol, are widely used in museum collections, especially for amphibian and reptile specimens (Simmons, 2002)
As biodiversity is rapidly declining around the world, museum specimens play an important role in biological research related to taxonomy (Arratia & QuezadaRomegialli, 2017), systematics (Huang et al, 2016), phylogeography (Godoy et al, 2004; How to cite this article Shu et al (2017), Effects of long-term preservation on amphibian body conditions: implications for historical morphological research
The results showed that the mean body length or mass of each sampled species were significantly (p < 0.05) different between pre-preservation and postpreservation (Tables S2 and S3)
Summary
Common preservative chemicals, such as formalin and ethanol, are widely used in museum collections, especially for amphibian and reptile specimens (Simmons, 2002). As biodiversity is rapidly declining around the world, museum specimens play an important role in biological research related to taxonomy (Arratia & QuezadaRomegialli, 2017), systematics (Huang et al, 2016), phylogeography (Godoy et al, 2004; How to cite this article Shu et al (2017), Effects of long-term preservation on amphibian body conditions: implications for historical morphological research. The body conditions (length and mass) of preserved specimens may change over time (Fey & Hare, 2005; Melo et al, 2010). Analyzing morphological data collected directly from historical specimens may generate misleading results
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