Total evidence and sensitivity phylogenetic analyses of egg‐brooding frogs (Anura: Hemiphractidae)

Abstract

We study the phylogenetic relationships of egg-brooding frogs, a group of 118 neotropical species, unique among anurans by having embryos with large bell-shaped gills and females carrying their eggs on the dorsum, exposed or inside a pouch. We assembled a total evidence dataset of published and newly generated data containing 51 phenotypic characters and DNA sequences of 20 loci for 143 hemiphractids and 127 outgroup terminals. We performed six analytical strategies combining different optimality criteria (parsimony and maximum likelihood), alignment methods (tree-and similarity-alignment), and three different indel coding schemes (fifth character state, unknown nucleotide, and presence/absence characters matrix). Furthermore, we analyzed a subset of the total evidence dataset to evaluate the impact of phenotypic characters on hemiphractid phylogenetic relationships. Our main results include: (i) monophyly of Hemiphractidae and its six genera for all our analyses, novel relationships among hemiphractid genera, and non-monophyly of Hemiphractinae according to our preferred phylogenetic hypothesis; (ii) non-monophyly of current supraspecific taxonomies of Gastrotheca, an updated taxonomy is provided; (iii) previous differences among studies were mainly caused by differences in analytical factors, not by differences in character/taxon sampling; (iv) optimality criteria, alignment method, and indel coding caused differences among optimal topologies, in that order of degree; (v) in most cases, parsimony analyses are more sensitive to the addition of phenotypic data than maximum likelihood analyses; (vi) adding phenotypic data resulted in an increase of shared clades for most analyses.

An assessment of the taxonomic validity of three species of marsupial frogs (Anura: Hemiphractidae: Gastrotheca) from the Yungas of Bolivia based on external morphology and cranial osteology

“…Our field experience, observations and data of Gastrotheca frogs from the Andean cloud forests of central Bolivia, plus the analyses presented herein, suggest that the recognition of three species in the area may be unjustified. The necessity of a reassessment of the taxonomic status of central Bolivian populations of Gastrotheca was clearly stated by Castroviejo-Fisher et al (2015) and Echevarría et al (2021), who in their analyses provisionally labelled some samples this region as Gastrotheca sp.1, G. sp. 2 and G. sp.…”

Bones and all: a new critically endangered Pantepui species of Stefania (Anura: Hemiphractidae) and a new osteological synapomorphy for the genus

“…To the best of my knowledge, the presence of a distal process on the third metacarpal had never been reported in Stefania [ 7 , 19 – 21 , 27 , 39 , 40 ]. I found this process (Fig.…”

Re‐evaluating the morphological evidence for the re‐evolution of lost mandibular teeth in frogs

“…One adult (KU:KUH:221635) was a brooding female with late‐stage embryos in its dorsal pouch, which allowed us to assess embryological anatomy of individuals with an approximate SVL of 13 mm. We compared the jaw and tooth morphology of G. guentheri to 19 additional specimens of other Gastrotheca (Table S1 ; four juveniles and 15 adults), representing 14 species and each of the eight recognized subgenera (Duellman 2015 ; Duellman and Cannatella 2018 ; but see Echevarría et al 2021 ). Specimens for this study are from the herpetological collections of the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute (KU) and Florida Museum of Natural History (UF).…”