“Endangered or an artifact of unsound taxonomy? Case of the critically endangered bush frog Philautus sanctisilvaticus Das and Chanda, 1997”

Abstract

We investigated the phylogenetic relationship of the Critically Endangered bush frog Philautus sanctisilvaticus Das and Chanda, 1997 and other species distributed across the fragmented forests of Deccan Peninsula and the northern Eastern Ghats. A short fragment of the mitochondrial 16S rRNA gene was employed to assess phylogenetic relationships across Philautus sanctisilvaticus Das and Chanda, 1997, Raorchestes terebrans (Das and Chanda, 1998) and Philautus similipalensis Dutta, 2003. All sequenced specimens, including material from near the type localities of P. sanctisilvaticus (Amarkantak) and P. similipalensis (Simlipal) were genetically extremely similar, with pairwise uncorrected distances <1% in the 16S gene, and were phylogenetically placed within the genus Raorchestes. The results based on morphology are ambiguous and do not go hand in hand with molecular data, which however do not provide support for a three species hypothesis either. our findings advocate the need for making nomenclatural amendments. Philautus sanctisilvaticus Das and Chanda, 1997, is the first available nomen for this taxon, and we propose to include this species in Raorchestes as Raorchestes sanctisilvaticus (Das and Chanda, 1997), and to consider the nomina Philautus terebrans Das and Chanda, 1998 syn. nov. and Philautus similipalensis Dutta, 2003 syn. nov. as junior subjective synonyms for this nomen following the Principle of Priority in article 23.1 of the ICZN. The findings are notable from the point of conservation of the species and present a novel case with remarkable genetic homogeneity across the fragmented forests of Deccan Peninsula and Eastern Ghats.

A NEW CRYPTIC SPECIES OF BUSH FROG (AMPHIBIA: ANURA: Raorchestes) FROM THE SOUTHERN EASTERN GHATS, INDIA

“…The low genetic divergence between R. charius and the new species is likely due to recent diversification, a scenario observed in several species of the genus Raorchestes (Vijayakumar et al 2014(Vijayakumar et al , 2016. Such shallow divergences have been previously reported in bush frog species pairs, such as R. bombayensis and R. sanctisilvaticus (1.0% to 1.9%), R. bombayensis and R. tuberohumerus (1.7 to 1.9%) (Mirza et al 2019). The new species is phylogenetically sister to R. charius, despite the geographical vicinity of the type locality of the new species to that of R. honnametti.…”

“…sushilduttai Giri, Bauer, Mohapatra et al, 2017;H. kolliensis Agarwal, Bauer, Giri et al, 2019;Hemiphyllodactylus kolliensis Agarwal, Khandekar, Giri et al, 2019, a caecilian, Gegeneophis orientalis Agarwal, Wilkinson, Mohapatra et al, 2013(Mirza et al 2019. Observations suggest that further species of lizards remain to be described from this region (Z.A.…”

“…wynaadensis (Jerdon, 1853). However, Mirza et al (2019) showed that the first three species also belong to the genus Raorchestes and represent not three, but a single species, R. sanctisilvaticus. The taxonomic status of the population inhabiting the Kolli Hills of R. cf.…”

LETTER TO EDITOR: A response to Narayanan et al. (2021) “On the validity of the recently described bush frog Raorchestes kollimalai Gowande, Ganesh & Mirza, 2020” published in Zootaxa

“…They credit Garg et al (2021) for highlighting the shallow divergence between the species. However, the findings were first presented by Mirza et al (2019) and confirmed by Garg et al (2021). This suggests a poor literature review by Narayanan et al (2021).…”

“…Shallow divergence: Narayanan et al (2021) draw attention to the case of shallow genetic divergence between R. bombayensis (Annandale, 1919) and R. sanctisilvaticus (Das & Chanda, 1997), which are broadly distributed across the Western Ghats and the Eastern Ghats respectively (Biju & Bossuyt 2009;Garg et al 2021;Mirza et al 2019). They credit Garg et al (2021) for highlighting the shallow divergence between the species.…”