Abstract
New species of amphibians are being reported at an astonishingly fast rate. These include some that have been known tothe commercial pet trade for years but have not been formally described due to uncertain origin. The distinctive phenotypeof “Pachytriton B” among the Chinese stout newts (also known as paddle-tailed newts) is one such example. Throughexamination of museum specimens, we locate a population from Mt. Mang within the Nanling Mountain Range with mor-phology and coloration similar to Pachytriton B. Molecular phylogenetic analyses strongly suggest that this populationand Pachytriton B belong to the same species, which differs from congeners morphologically and chromatically and isdescribed here as a new species. This species is characterized by a large and stout body, uniformly light brown dorsum,and orange spots or blotches that extend ribbon-like along the dorsolateral sides of the body. A mitochondrial genealogysuggests that the new species is the sister taxon to the group (P. brevipes + P. feii). Morphologically, this species is significantly stouter than P. feii and has significantly longer limbs than P. brevipes.References
AmphibiaWeb: Information on amphibian biology and conservation. [web application]. 2012. Berkeley, California: AmphibiaWeb. Available: http://amphibiaweb.org/ (Accessed: April 20, 2012).
Chang, M.L.Y. (1933) On the salamanders of Chekiang. Contributions from the Biological Laboratory of the Science Society of China, 9, 305–328.
Chang, M.L.Y. (1935) Note preliminaire sur la classification des salamandres d’Asie Orientale. Bulletin de la Société zoologique de France, 60, 424–427.
Funk, W.C., Caminer, M. & Ron, S.R. (2012) High levels of cryptic species diversity uncovered in Amazonian frogs. Proceedings of the Royal Society B - Biological Sciences, 279, 1806–1814.
Fei, L., Hu, S., Ye, C. & Huang, Y. eds. (2006) Fauna Sinica, Amphibia Vol. 1. Beijing, China: Science Press (In Chinese).
Fei, L., Ye, C., Huang, Y. & Liu, M. (1999) Atlas of amphibians of China. Zhengzhou, China: Henan Science and Technical Press (In Chinese).
Hou, M., Zhou, Z., Li, P. & Lu, S. (2009) Rediscovery of Pingia granulosus (Chang, 1933), and description of the neotype specimens. Sichuan Journal of Zoology, 28, 15–18 (In Chinese).
Huelsenbeck, J.P. & Ronquist, F. (2001) MRBAYES: Bayesian inference of phylogenetic trees. Bioinformatics, 17, 754–755.
Kass, R.E. & Raftery, A.E. (1995) Bayes factors. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 90, 773–795.
Li, J.T., Liu, J., Chen, Y.Y., Wu, J.W., Murphy, R.W., Zhao, E.M., Wang, Y.Z. & Zhang, Y.P. (2012) Molecular phylogeny of treefrogs in the Rhacophorus dugritei species complex (Anura: Rhacophoridae), with descriptions of two new species. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 165, 143–162.
Meegaskumbura, M., Bossuyt, F., Pethiyagoda, R., Manamendra-Arachchi, K., Bahir, M., Milinkovitch, M. C. & Schneider, C. J. (2002) Sri Lanka: An amphibian hotspot. Science, 298, 379.
Miller, M.A., Pfeiffer, W. & Schwartz, T. (2010) Creating the CIPRES Science Gateway for inference of large phylogenetic trees. Proceedings of the Gateway Computing Environments Workshop (GCE), 14 Nov. 2010, New Orleans, LA pp 1–8.
Mudrack, W. (1984) Paarungsverhalten und Eiablage bei Pachytriton brevipeds Boulenger, 1878. Sauria, 6, 5–8.
Nishikawa, K., Jiang. J., Matsui, M. & Chen, C. (2009) Morphological variation in Pachytriton labiatus and a re-assessment of the taxonomic status of P. granulosus (Amphibia: Urodela: Salamandridae). Current Herpetology, 28, 49–64.
Nishikawa, K., Jiang, J., Matsui, M. & Mo Y. (2011a) Unmasking Pachytriton labiatus (Amphibia: Urodela: Salamandridae), with description of a new species of Pachytriton from Guangxi, China. Zoological Science, 28, 453–461.
Nishikawa, K., Jiang, J. & Matsui, M. (2011b) Two new species of Pachytriton from Anhui and Guangxi, China (Amphibia: Urodela: Salamandridae). Current Herpetology, 30, 15–31.
Nylander, J. A. A. (2004) MrModeltest v2 [Computer software and manual]. Program distributed by the author. Evolutionary Biology Centre, Uppsala University. Available via http://www.abc.se/~nylander/
Rambaut, A. & Drummond, A.J. (2007) Tracer v1.5, Available from http://beast.bio.ed.ac.uk/Tracer (Accessed May, 20, 2012)
Rambaut, A. (1995) Se–Al: Sequence alignment program. Oxford University, Oxford, U.K. Available from http://tree.bio.ed.ac.uk/software/seal/ (Accessed: April 24, 2012).
Shen, Y., Shen, D. & Mo, X. (2008) A new species of salamander Pachytriton archospotus from Hunan Province, China (Amphibia, Salamandridae). Acta Zoologica Sinica, 54, 645–652 (In Chinese).
Stamatakis, A. (2006) RAxML-VI-HPC: maximum likelihood-based phylogenetic analyses with thousands of taxa and mixed models. Bioinformatics, 22, 2688–2690.
Stamatakis, A., Hoover, P. & Rougemont, J. (2008) A rapid bootstrap algorithm for the RAxML web servers. Systematic Biology, 57, 758–771.
Steinfartz, S., Vicario, S., Arntzen, J.W. & Caccone, A. (2007) A Bayesian approach on molecules and behavior: Reconsidering phylogenetic and evolutionary patterns of the Salamandridae with emphasis on Triturus newts. Journal of Experimental Zoology (Molecular and Developmental Evolution), 308B, 139–162.
Tamura, K., Peterson, D., Peterson, N., Stecher, G., Nei, M. & Kumar, S. (2011) MEGA5: Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis using Maximum Likelihood, Evolutionary Distance, and Maximum Parsimony Methods. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 28, 2731–2739.
Thiesmeier, B. & Hornberg, C. (1997) Paarung, fortpflanzung and larvalentwicklung von Pachytriton sp. (Pachytriton A) nebst bemerkungen zur taxonomie der gattung. Salamandra, 33, 97–110.
Vieites D. R.,Wollenberg K. C., Andreone F., Kohler J., Glaw F. & Vences M. (2009) Vast underestimation of Madagascar's biodiversity evidenced by an integrative amphibian inventory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 106, 8267–8272.
Weisrock, D.W., Papenfuss, T.J., Macey, J.R., Litvinchuk, S.N., Polymeni, R., Ugurtas, I.H., Zhao, E., Jowkar, H. & Larson, A. (2006) A molecular assessment of phylogenetic relationships and lineage accumulation rates within the family Salamandridae (Amphibia, Caudata). Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 41, 368–383.
Wu, Y., Rovito, S.M., Papenfuss, T.J. & Hanken, J. (2009) A new species of the genus Paramesotriton (Caudata: Salamandridae) from Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, southern China. Zootaxa, 2060, 59–68.
Wu, Y., Wang, Y., Jiang, K. & Hanken, J. (2010a) A new newt of the genus Cynops (Caudata: Salamandridae) from Fujian Province, southeastern China. Zootaxa, 2346, 42–52.
Wu, Y., Jiang, K. & Hanken, J. (2010b) A new species of newt of the genus Paramesotriton (Salamandridae) from southwestern Guangdong, China, with a new northern record of P. longliensis from western Hubei. Zootaxa, 2494, 49–58.
Wu, Y., Wang, Y., Jiang, K., Chen, X. & Hanken J. (2010c) Homoplastic evolution of external coloration in Asian stout newts (Pachytriton) inferred from molecular phylogeny. Zoologica Scripta, 39, 9–22.
Wu, Y., Wang, Y. & Hanken, J. (2012) Comparative osteology of the genus Pachytriton (Caudata: Salamandridae) from southeastern China. Asian Herpetological Research, 3, 83–102.
Xu, J., Zou, P., Wen, C. & Li, S. (2002) A primary study on structure and food habit of Pachytriton labiatus in Nanling at North of Guangdong. Chinese Journal of Zoology, 37, 9–11 (In Chinese).
Zhang, P., Papenfuss, T.J., Wake, M.H., Qu, L. & Wake, D.B. (2008) Phylogeny and biogeography of the family Salamandridae (Amphibia: Caudata) inferred from complete mitochondrial genomes. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 49, 586–597.
Zhao, E. & Hu, Q. (1984) Studies on Chinese tailed amphibians. Chengdu, China: Sichuan Scientific and Technical Publishing House (In Chinese).