The identity of emIndosylvirana nicobariensis/em (Stoliczka 1870) (Amphibia, Ranidae) from northeast India.

Abstract

Stoliczka (1870) described Hylorana nicobariensis from the Nicobar Islands of India. The generic allocation of this enigmatic species is yet to be fully resolved (Chan et al. 2020b) and it has been placed in different genera (Boulenger 1885; Frost et al. 2006; Che et al. 2007; Oliver et al. 2015; Chan et al. 2020a; Chandramouli et al. 2020). As of now, the species is assigned to the genus Indosylvirana (Oliver et al. 2015; Chan et al. 2020b; Frost 2020). Apart from Nicobar archipelago, this species is distributed in the insular regions of southeast Asia (Oliver et al. 2015; Chandramouli et al. 2020; Frost 2020) and the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Mizoram, Tripura and West Bengal in northeast India (Sarkar et al. 1992, 2002; Sarkar Ray 2006; Ahmed et al. 2009; Mathew Sen 2010; Lalremsanga 2011; Lalremsanga et al. 2015, 2016). However, Frost (2020) doubted the records of this species in northeast India. Systematic studies on the herpetofauna of northeast India based on molecular evidence are scanty (Lalronunga et al. 2020a), and species recorded from the area need confirmation (Frost 2020). Recent studies revealed that many species previously recorded from northeast India were based on misidentifications (Das et al. 2019; Giri et al. 2019; Lalronunga et al. 2020b), therefore, a review and revalidation on the herpetofaunal list of the area is warranted. Herein, we examined the identity of the species recorded as I. nicobariensis from northeast India using morphological data and a fragment of 16S rRNA mitochondrial gene.