Abstract
Sri Lanka is an amphibian hotspot of global significance. Its anuran fauna is dominated by the shrub frogs of the genus Pseudophilautus. Except for one small clade of four species in Peninsular India, these cool-wet adapted frogs, numbering some 59 extant species, are distributed mainly across the montane and lowland rain forests of the island. With species described primarily by morphological means, the diversification has never yet been subjected to a molecular species delimitation analysis, a procedure now routinely applied in taxonomy. Here we test the species boundaries of Pseudophilautus in the context of the phylogenetic species concept (PSC). We use all the putative species for which credible molecular data are available (nDNA–Rag-1; mt-DNA– 12S rRNA, 16S rRNA) to build a well resolved phylogeny, which is subjected to species delimitation analyses. The ABGD, bPTP, mPTP and bGMYC species delimitation methods applied to the 16S rRNA frog barcoding gene (for all species), 12S rRNA and Rag-1 nDNA grouped P. procax and P. abundus; P. hallidayi and P. fergusonianus; P. reticulatus and P. pappilosus; P. pleurotaenia and P. hoipolloi; P. hoffmani and P. asankai; P. silvaticus and P. limbus; P. dilmah and P. hankeni; P. fulvus and P. silus.. Surprisingly, all analyses recovered 14 unidentified potential new species as well. The geophylogeny affirms a distribution across the island’s aseasonal ‘wet zone’ and its three principal hill ranges, suggestive of allopatric speciation playing a dominant role, especially between mountain masses. Among the species that are merged by the delimitation analyses, a pattern leading towards a model of parapatric speciation emerges–ongoing speciation in the presence of gene flow. This delimitation analysis reinforces the species hypotheses, paving the way to a reasonable understanding of Sri Lankan Pseudophilautus, enabling both deeper analyses and conservation efforts of this remarkable diversification. http://zoobank.org/urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:DA869B6B-870A-4ED3-BF5D-5AA3F69DDD27.
Highlights
As a part of the Sri Lanka-Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot, Sri Lanka features an exceptional species richness and endemism in amphibians [1, 2]
We show the existence of several potential new species, underscoring that Pseudophilautus would benefit from further taxonomic assessment
The phylogenetic analysis indicates that the internal nodes of the Pseudophilautus clades are, for the most part, well supported
Summary
As a part of the Sri Lanka-Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot, Sri Lanka features an exceptional species richness and endemism in amphibians [1, 2]. The family Rhacophoridae, spread across tropical to sub-tropical Asia and Africa, is a diverse group of frogs containing some 432 species, 6% of the world’s anuran fauna [4, 5]. Their taxonomy, evolution and biogeography have been studied in several recent analyses [2, 6,7,8,9,10,11,12]; much of this work has involved molecular analyses. Molecular data are available for only about 73% of the species (Genbank, last accessed January 2021). Together with a clearly resolved taxonomy, are critical to biological research, especially in evolution, ecology, conservation, and biogeography [13]
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