17
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      A new species of Amazonian snouted treefrog (Hylidae: Scinax) with description of a novel species-habitat association for an aquatic breeding frog

      research-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          The genus Scinax is one of the most specious genera of treefrogs of the family Hylidae. Despite the high number of potential new species of Scinax revealed in recent studies, the rate of species descriptions for Amazonia has been low in the last decade. A potential cause of this low rate may be the existence of morphologically cryptic species. Describing new species may not only impact the taxonomy and systematics of a group of organisms but also benefit other fields of biology. Ecological studies conducted in megadiverse regions, such as Amazonia, often meet challenging questions concerning insufficient knowledge of organismal alpha taxonomy. Due to that, detecting species-habitat associations is dependent on our ability to properly identify species. In this study, we first provide a description of a new species (including its tadpoles) of the genus Scinax distributed along heterogeneous landscapes in southern Amazonia; and secondly assess the influence of environmental heterogeneity on the new species’ abundance and distribution. Scinax ruberoculatus sp. nov. differs from all nominal congeners by its small size (SVL 22.6–25.9 mm in males and 25.4–27.5 mm in females), by having a dark brown spot on the head and scapular region shaped mainly like the moth Copiopteryx semiramis (or a human molar in lateral view, or a triangle), bicolored reddish and grey iris, snout truncate in dorsal view, bilobate vocal sac in males, by its advertisement call consisting of a single pulsed note with duration of 0.134–0.331 s, 10–23 pulses per note, and dominant frequency 1,809–1,895 Hz. Both occurrence and abundance of the new species are significantly influenced by silt content in the soil. This finding brings the first evidence that edaphic factors influence species-habitat association in Amazonian aquatic breeding frogs.

          Related collections

          Most cited references105

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: not found

          Global patterns and determinants of vascular plant diversity.

          Plants, with an estimated 300,000 species, provide crucial primary production and ecosystem structure. To date, our quantitative understanding of diversity gradients of megadiverse clades such as plants has been hampered by the paucity of distribution data. Here, we investigate the global-scale species-richness pattern of vascular plants and examine its environmental and potential historical determinants. Across 1,032 geographic regions worldwide, potential evapotranspiration, the number of wet days per year, and measurements of topographical and habitat heterogeneity emerge as core predictors of species richness. After accounting for environmental effects, the residual differences across the major floristic kingdoms are minor, with the exception of the uniquely diverse Cape Region, highlighting the important role of historical contingencies. Notably, the South African Cape region contains more than twice as many species as expected by the global environmental model, confirming its uniquely evolved flora. A combined multipredictor model explains approximately 70% of the global variation in species richness and fully accounts for the enigmatic latitudinal gradient in species richness. The models illustrate the geographic interplay of different environmental predictors of species richness. Our findings highlight that different hypotheses about the causes of diversity gradients are not mutually exclusive, but likely act synergistically with water-energy dynamics playing a dominant role. The presented geostatistical approach is likely to prove instrumental for identifying richness patterns of the many other taxa without single-species distribution data that still escape our understanding.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: not found

            Emerging infectious disease and the loss of biodiversity in a Neotropical amphibian community.

            Pathogens rarely cause extinctions of host species, and there are few examples of a pathogen changing species richness and diversity of an ecological community by causing local extinctions across a wide range of species. We report the link between the rapid appearance of a pathogenic chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis in an amphibian community at El Copé, Panama, and subsequent mass mortality and loss of amphibian biodiversity across eight families of frogs and salamanders. We describe an outbreak of chytridiomycosis in Panama and argue that this infectious disease has played an important role in amphibian population declines. The high virulence and large number of potential hosts of this emerging infectious disease threaten global amphibian diversity.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: not found
              • Article: not found

              A simplified table for staging anuran embryos and larvae with notes on identification

                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                PeerJ
                PeerJ
                peerj
                peerj
                PeerJ
                PeerJ Inc. (San Francisco, USA )
                2167-8359
                9 February 2018
                2018
                : 6
                : e4321
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ecologia, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia , Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil
                [2 ]Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University , Sydney, Australia
                [3 ]Department of Zoology, National Museum , Prague, Czech Republic
                [4 ]Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Federal do Amazonas , Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil
                [5 ]Coordenação de Biodiversidade, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia , Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil
                Article
                4321
                10.7717/peerj.4321
                5808318
                29441233
                51607456-5354-4ebe-b039-3839cdce78ea
                ©2018 Ferrão et al.

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.

                History
                : 13 July 2017
                : 13 January 2018
                Funding
                Funded by: PRONEX-FAPEAM/CNPq
                Award ID: proj. 003/2009
                Award ID: proc. 653/2009
                Funded by: Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic
                Award ID: DKRVO 2016/15
                Award ID: 2017/15
                Award ID: 2018/15
                Funded by: National Museum
                Award ID: 00023272
                Funded by: Centro de Estudos Integrados da Biodiversidade Amazônica (CENBAM)
                Funded by: FAPESP/FAPEAM
                Award ID: 465/2010
                Funded by: CNPq
                Award ID: 473308/2009-6
                Funded by: HIDROVEG project
                Funded by: PRONEX-FAPEAM
                Award ID: 1600/2006
                Funded by: PPBio Manaus
                Award ID: CNPq 558318/2009-6
                Funded by: PRONEX-FAPEAM
                Award ID: ed. 016/2006
                Award ID: proc. 1437/2007
                Funded by: CNPq
                Award ID: proc. 573721/2008-4
                Funded by: FAPEAM
                Funded by: CAPES
                This study was funded and supported by PRONEX-FAPEAM/CNPq (proj. 003/2009, proc. 653/2009), Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic (DKRVO 2017/15, National Museum, 00023272), and Centro de Estudos Integrados da Biodiversidade Amazônica (CENBAM). The collection of soil, water table and forest structure data used in this study was funded by FAPESP/FAPEAM (465/2010) and CNPq (473308/2009-6) by the HIDROVEG project, and additional funding was provided by PRONEX-FAPEAM (1600/2006), PPBio Manaus (CNPq 558318/2009-6). The holotype and tadpole photographs were taken with equipment acquired under a grant from PRONEX-FAPEAM (ed. 016/2006, proc. 1437/2007) provided to José Albertino Rafael. Miquéias Ferrão was granted a fellowship from CNPq (proc. 573721/2008-4), FAPEAM and CAPES. Rafael de Fraga was granted a PhD scholarship from CAPES. Jiří Moravec was financially supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic (DKRVO 2016/15, 2017/15, and 2018/15). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
                Categories
                Ecology
                Taxonomy
                Zoology

                amazonia,anura,taxonomy,ecology,environmental heterogeneity,edaphic factors

                Comments

                Comment on this article