Systematic And Phylogenetic Analysis Of Relationships Between The Members Of The Southeast Asian Frogs Of The Raninae With Particular Emphasis On The Thai Species

Download or read book Systematic and Phylogenetic Analysis of Relationships Between the Members of the Southeast-Asian Frogs of the Raninae, with Particular Emphasis on the Thai Species written by Yodchaiy Chuaynkern and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phylogenetics analysis of the relationships between the members of the Raninae sensu DUBOIS (1992) was studied based on morphological data. Seventy-one taxa were included in the analyses including members of the genera Limnonectes, Amolops, Rana, Staurois and Rhacophorus. Among them, four taxa were treated as outgroup (Rana angolensis, Rana fuscigula, Limnonectes kuhlii and Rhacophorus rhodopus). A total of 241 morphological characters (123 from external morphology, 1 from tadpole and 118 from morphometry) were scored. Gap-weighting and step-matrix gap-weighting methods were adopted to code polymorphic and morphometric characters by using values of frequencies and means, respectively. The analysis was performed by using PAUP* (version 4.0b10).Results from gap-weighting coding yielded 2 equally shortest parsimonious trees with a length of 7901 steps, a CI of 0.415 and a RI of 0.3300. The tree obtained from the Neighbor-joining search has received tree length of 8029 steps, a CI of 0.4443 and a RI of 0.3102. Results from step-matrix gap-weighting coding yielded a single shortest tree with a length of 29606 steps, a CI of 0.1851 and a RI of 0.5852. The tree from Neighbor-joining search is chosen for describing the relationships among the groups.Although the aim of this study was to determine the relationships among the members of the Raninae sensu DUBOIS (1992), the results only partially support previous hypotheses of relationships within some groups. Results of the present work suggest that in further intensive phylogenetic analysis attention should be paid to Babina and Nidirana, Rana humeralis, Rana montivaga, Rana luctuosa, Rana malabarica, Odorrana and Eburana, and Sylvirana.The results demonstrate the choice among different methods for dealing with characters is important and the application of different methods to the same data produces different trees. Further, using characters on external morphology and morphometry only should not be enough to find the relationship patterns. Other kinds of data such as musculature, skeleton, chromosomes, behavior, ecology, tadpoles maybe adopted for reconstruction the phylogeny as well as the molecular data.