A new species of Leucostethus (Anura: Dendrobatidae) from the eastern versant of the Central Cordillera of Colombia and the phylogenetic status of Colostethus fraterdanieli

Abstract

We describe a new species of Dendrobatidae from the eastern flank of the northern Central Cordillera in Colombia and assign it to the recently named genus Leucostethus. We also assess the phylogenetic status of the Colostethus fraterdanieli “complex” which according to our phylogenetic inference, is closely related to the new species. We use morphological, genetic and bioacoustic evidence to describe the new species and to expand the phylogeny of the genus Leucostethus. As a result, we transfer the content of C. fraterdanieli “complex” to Leucostethus. The new species differs from the Leucostethus fraterdanieli “complex” species by having white testes, straight pale ventrolateral stripes and high genetic divergence (17% in Cyt-b). According to our results, the genus Leucostethus is distributed in the western Amazonia from Ecuador and Peru, and both the northern Andes and Pacific lowlands in Colombia. We also found that L. fraterdanieli sensu stricto is restricted from mid (1600 m.a.s.l) to high (2500 m.a.s.l) elevation on the northern Central Cordillera in Antioquia. Extensive geographic sampling and more thorough morphological and bioacoustic examination need to be considered to solve the genetic clusters observed in the Leucostethus fraterdanieli “complex”.

Advertisement call of a population of the nurse frog Leucostethus fraterdanieli (Anura: Dendrobatidae), with notes on its natural history

“…Among them, there was a clade distributed along the Cauca river valley and the adjacent flanks of the Central and Western Cordilleras of Colombia, from Popayán (Department of Cauca) to Filandia (Department of Quindío), that they assigned to C. brachistriatus (Rivero & Serna, 1986). As pointed out by Grant & Castro (1998), the extensive within-and among-population morphological variation in L. fraterdanieli (previously included in the genus Colostethus and transferred to Leucostethus by Marín et al, 2018), suggests a complex of closely resembling species, corroborated by different authors (Grant et al, 2006(Grant et al, , 2017Santos et al, 2009;Marín et al, 2018). Therefore, hereafter we will refer to our study species as L. fraterdanieli complex.…”

“…For the population of the Western Cordillera, notes ranged between 38-49 ms (Grant & Castro, 1998), while for the population that we analyzed in the Central Andes, note duration was between 63-122 ms. Recently, Marín et al (2018) (Grant & Castro, 1998;Marín et al, 2018). However, individuals from Manizales are morphologically indistinguishable from L. fraterdanieli sensu stricto (fide Grant et al, 2017).…”

A new species of Leucostethus (Anura, Dendrobatidae) from Gorgona Island, Colombia

“…both in the recorded calls and the many calls that were heard, but not recorded) emitted in bouts of < 30 s duration, we classified the individual units of sound as notes grouped into calls. This treatment is consistent with the interpretation by Vigle et al (2020) of Leucostethus bilsa Vigle et al 2020 , which emitted units of sound in bouts of < 60 s. In contrast, other species of trans-Andean Leucostethus emit sounds at regular intervals in bouts varying from less than one minute to several minutes in duration, forming continuous series of variable length (a few to more than 300; Grant and Castro 1998 ); as such, in those species, Grant and Castro (1998) and Marin et al (2018) considered calls to comprise a single note. For comparison, we treat the values reported by Grant and Castro (1998) and Marin et al (2018) for “calls” as equivalent to the values reported by Vigle et al (2020) and us as “notes.”…”

“…Information on phylogenetic relationships was taken from Grant et al (2017) , Marin et al (2018) , and Vigle et al (2020) . Although Grant et al (2017) included the undescribed species from Gorgona Island in their Colostethus fraterdanieli group, Marin et al (2018) subsequently transferred that group to Leucostethus , and we follow their taxonomy here. Character definitions follow Grant et al (2006 , 2017 ).…”

“…We compare the new species to other species of Leucostethus sensu Marin et al (2018) [viz. L. argyrogaster (Morales & Schulte, 1993); L. bilsa , L. brachistriatus (Rivero & Serna, 1986), L. fraterdanieli (Silverstone, 1971), L. fugax (Morales & Schulte, 1993), L. jota Marin et al, 2018 , and L. ramirezi (Rivero & Serna, “1995” 2000)], to which we add L. alacris (Rivero & Granados-Díaz, 1990) comb. nov., L. dysprosium (Rivero & Serna, “1995” 2000) comb.…”