Evolution of advertisement call in the genera Adenomera and Leptodactylus (Anura, Leptodactylidae, Leptodacylinae), with taxonomic application to populations and species within Leptodactylinae

Author(s)

Thiago Ribeiro de Carvalho Tavares

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Ribeirão Preto.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Ribeirão Preto (PCARP/BC)
• Defense date: 2017-04-27

Examining board members

Ariovaldo Antonio Giaretta; Célio Fernando Baptista Haddad; Cynthia Peralta de Almeida Prado

• Advisor: Ariovaldo Antonio Giaretta

Abstract

In anurans, vocalizations are usually conspicuous and stereotyped to some extent. In this group, the major acoustic signal broadcast by males (advertisement signal/call) basically encodes two kinds of information: the attraction of conspecific females and the advertisement of the position of a calling male, maintaining male spacing functioning as an auditory cue in the delimitation of calling sites in territorial species. More recently, the development of computational methods as a means of incorporation of phylogenetic information available for a given group of organisms allowed scientists to explore evolutionary trends and to test for adaptative hypotheses more properly, taking into consideration phylogenetic dependence among taxa. Leptodactylinae is a species-rich taxon (ca. 95 spp.), whose distribution encompasses the Neotropical region. This frog group exhibits a remarkable diversity of vocalizations. This pattern in Leptodactylinae draws attention to the fact that this group could be a promising model organism to studies focused on macroevolutionary patterns and processes involved in the acoustic evolution in this vertebrate group. In the present study, a comprehensive acoustic review was conducted, and it was the first time for this group that the analytical procedures and standardized settings were employed in an automated fashion for the quantification of acoustic traits. The results of the acoustic analysis was then associated with morphological patterns as a means to investigate the patterns of cryptic diversity and taxonomic reappraisals for some populations and species, as well as the application of comparative methods from the results obtained to explore the major evolutionary trends and processes of acoustic traits in this frog group. The results revealed that there are distinctive patterns of phenotypic differentiation present across Leptodactylinae clades, which indicate that taxonomic reassessments are required, particularly in the L. melanonotus clade (revaluation of the junior synonyms showed that two species should be relavalidated) and Adenomera (cryptic diversity was uncovered under the name A. hylaedactyla based on acoustic evidence). The phylogenetic comparative methods recovered interesting evolutionary trends as, for instance, the convergent appearances and losses of structures related to the time domain (pulses) and remarkable changes in the frequency domain (doubling of the fundamental frequency in some species of Adenomera), both phenomena being apparently unrelated to differences in body size or calling habitats. The acoustic data gathered here was efficient in species discrimination and should represent a good line of evidence to address species-level taxonomy in Leptodactylinae. Future research focused on aspects of the vocal apparatus and the mechanisms of sound production might tell us more about the evolutionary processes involved in the distinctive acoustic patterns that were recognized in Leptodactylinae (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 12/15763-7 - Advertisement call evolution in the genus Leptodactylus (Anura, Leptodactylidae, Leptodactylinae), with taxonomic application on populations and species of the genus
• Grantee: Thiago Ribeiro de Carvalho Tavares
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate