Nadia Paez, a PhD student at the University of British Columbia, and Pontifical Catholic University’s Professor Santiago Ron have discovered eleven new species of the frog genus Pristimantis living in the Ecuadorian Andes.
The rain frogs comprise a unique group lacking a tadpole stage of development. Their eggs are laid on land and hatch as tiny froglets. Image credit: BIOWEB-PUCE.
Pristimantis is the most diverse genus of tetrapods — a group of vertebrates that includes amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals — with 532 described species.
This genus is distributed from Honduras in Central America to northern Argentina and southern Brazil, from the sea level to elevations above 13,100 feet (4,000 m).
In Ecuador, it comprises 34.3% of the frog diversity with over 200 species.
The newly-discovered species are Pristimantis atillo, P. chomskyi, P. gloria, P. jimenezi, P. lutzae, P. multicolor, P. nangaritza, P. teslai, P. torresi, P. totoroi, and P. verrucolatus.
The multicolored rain frog (Pristimantis multicolor). Image credit: BIOWEB-PUCE.
“Amongst these new species, there is the multicolored rain frog (Pristimantis multicolor), where the name refers to its outstanding color variation,” Paez and Professor Ron said.
“Individuals vary from bright yellow to dark brown. Initially, the studied specimens were assumed to belong to at least two separate species.”
“However, genetic data demonstrated that they represented a single, even if highly variable, species.”
All new species have very restricted geographic ranges and are assigned to the IUCN Red List categories ‘Data Deficient’ or ‘Threatened with extinction.’
“Their habitats are being destroyed by human activities, especially cattle raising, agriculture, and mining,” the scientists said.
The team’s paper was published in the journal ZooKeys.
_____
N.B. Páez & S.R. Ron. 2019. Systematics of Huicundomantis, a new subgenus of Pristimantis (Anura, Strabomantidae) with extraordinary cryptic diversity and eleven new species. ZooKeys 868: 1-112; doi: 10.3897/zookeys.868.26766
