# New pumilio species to come?



## chuckpowell (May 12, 2004)

I'm reading a really interesting article I found on the internet: Hagemann, Sabine and Pröhl, Heike, 2007, Mitochondrial paraphyly in a polymorphic poison frog speceis (Dendrobatidae: D. pumilio): Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. Unfortunately the pdf I have doesn't list volume or page numbers. Anyway the paper shows a dendrogram of MP, ML, and Bayesian phylogeny of a number of different sites where O. pumilio has been collected with outgroups of O. arboreus and O. speciousus. What it shows is a bunch of variably colored O. pumilio cluster out close by D. arboreus, another group of red to orange frogs with blue legs cluster out separately, and Escudo de Veraguas O. pumilio cluster out separately but closely with D. speciosus. My interpretation is the red with blue leg frogs will remain O. pumilio, the varicolored group with need to be described as a new species and Escudo's will need to be named as a new species. There has been notes in the literature saying that O. pumilio is a species group comprised on multiple species, but this is the first thing I've seen that shows where the various sites where O. pumilio has been collected might fall out. 

Best,

Chuck


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## frogparty (Dec 27, 2007)

I was looking at a similar breakdown on a European site not too long ago, where escudo was already considered to be split out from pumilio based on call amongst other things. Im not suprised really. Many species complexes exist and are constantly at the mercy of the lumpers vs splitters. What else are taxonomists supposed to do with their time?


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## JimO (May 14, 2010)

Does this mean that all the island populations from Boca del Toros will no longer be O. pumilio?


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## bchan (Feb 21, 2009)

> Unfortunately the pdf I have doesn't list volume or page numbers


Hagemann S., Prohl H. 2007 Mitochondrial paraphyly in a poymorphic poison frog species (Dendrobatidae; D. pumilio) Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 45(2) 740-747


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## tclipse (Sep 19, 2009)

Considering it was written in 2007, it doesn't seem like anyone's in a huge hurry to do this. Interesting though..


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## MonarchzMan (Oct 23, 2006)

It seems to me that the Europeans largely accept this change, but that's pretty much the extent of it. Personally, I am skeptical of the conclusions in the paper simply because Wang et al came out with a phylogeny shortly after this one, and came up with largely different results. 

The thing that is most striking to me is that both of the phylogenies don't really make sense _ecologically_. For example, Prohl's paper has the Siquirres more closely related to the Bri Bri and Puerto Viejo populations which are a distance from Siquirres (and other populations are much closer than Siquirres is to Bri Bri). And having Escudos most closely related to speciosus reeeaaalllly does not make sense to me. Wang's paper isn't much better in saying that Uyama frogs are most closely related to Costa Rican frogs than any of the Bocas frogs which _really_ doesn't make sense to me.

Ecologically, I don't really understand the phylogenies, so I can't really accept them. As best as I can tell, they're victims of sample size (only a couple frogs for each population) and possibly methodology (I'm told mtDNA isn't always all that great for constructing phylogenies).

I will probably get reamed by the geneticists, but I think that phylogenies, like these, based on genetics are very, very limited, and you can only really make shallow conclusions at best (by phylogenies like these, I mean phylogenies of closely related populations). These are very closely related populations (only really diverging in the last 10,000 years), so the genetics is going to be rough in separating them out. So, in my opinion, if you're going to separate them out into species, I would say that you need to do so ecologically and/or evolutionarily. As such, I would separate them out based on the fact that they're on islands and not likely to interbreed, as opposed to the genetics (maybe adding that as additional evidence, but not the basis of the separation). Genetics are informative, but for this species, fairly weak, so I don't really think that you can really separate them out solely based on that.

JimO, under Prohl's suggestion, the Costa Rican populations would be O. typographus, the Bocas frogs would be O. pumilio, and Escudo would be a separate species.


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## ETwomey (Jul 22, 2004)

Whether it makes ecological sense or not, mitochondrial phylogenies are based on a hell of a lot of data. I don't doubt the tree reflects the real evolution of pumilio's mitochodrial genome. But, this doesn't necessarily mean this tree reflects the evolutionary history of the species. Gene trees don't have to equal species trees. There are at least a few processes that can lead to discrepancies between the two. We described Ameerega yoshina despite this species not being resolved according to a mt tree. But we had good evidence (calls) that they were a distinct breeding entity from bassleri. So, I guess the opposite scenario could also be true, where a tree suggests different species but other data suggests otherwise.


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## MonarchzMan (Oct 23, 2006)

Sorry, I guess I didn't clarify exactly what I meant. I know that these phylogenies are based on a lot of data, but what I meant by sampling size was the number of frogs that they got their data from. Wang's paper, for example, only got data from 2-4 frogs for any given population (and I believe that Prohl's paper is the same). I guess personally, I would think that that is incredibly low sample size and would be difficult to make species level conclusions based on a few frogs.

I just think that for pumilio (and other species complexes) that genetic data need to be taken with a grain of salt, and need to be accompanied with ecological data (like breeding info).


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## markbudde (Jan 4, 2008)

When are the hobbyists going to contribute? It costs about $20 to sequence a sample and it seems that these "disputes" could be resolved fairly easily if people just swabbed their frogs. Along a similar line, is anyone working on using DNA sequence to work out frog lines and how inbred they are?


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## MonarchzMan (Oct 23, 2006)

markbudde said:


> When are the hobbyists going to contribute? It costs about $20 to sequence a sample and it seems that these "disputes" could be resolved fairly easily if people just swabbed their frogs. Along a similar line, is anyone working on using DNA sequence to work out frog lines and how inbred they are?


Part of the problem with that is that for the large majority of the frogs in the hobby, we have no idea where they came from. For a study like that, you'd really need site specific data. Not only that, but because of the possibility of the inbreeding with the frogs, that may affect the results.

I don't know of anyone looking at the amount of inbreeding in the frogs, though. Short of perhaps some zoos.


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