Mantidactylus (Chonomantis)

Grosjean, Stéphane, STRAUss, Axel, Glos, Julian, Randrianiaina, Roger-Daniel, Ohler, Annemarie & Vences, Miguel, 2011, Morphological and ecological uniformity in the funnel-mouthed tadpoles of Malagasy litter frogs, subgenus Chonomantis, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 162 (1), pp. 149-183 : 179

DIVERSITY OF CHONOMANTIS

The tadpoles of M. brevipalmatus and M. charlotteae used in this study have already been described by Blommers-Schlösser (1979) under the names M. aerumnalis and M. albofrenatus , respectively ( Vences & Glaw, 2004). This author described also the tadpole of M. opiparis in the same paper, but at that time, M. melanopleura was still considered a synonym of M. opiparis and was only resurrected by Vences & Glaw (2004). Blommers-Schlösser’s (1979) description is very succinct and describes only characters general to all Chonomantis tadpole species, and lacks information that could be useful to assign the described tadpoles to species. From the measurements given, the M. opiparis tadpoles of Blommers-Schlösser (1979) differ from our sample: this author gives BL and TL ranges of 6–9 mm and 20.5–31.0 mm, respectively, for tadpoles in stage 25, and 9–10 mm and 31–36 mm for those in stage 27. The tadpoles described here are slightly larger, BL 7.4–11.3, TL 24.7–39.9 mm for stage 25 and BL 9–11, TL 35.1– 43.7 mm for stage 27. The relative tail length is 2.2–2.6 in the sample of Blommers-Schlösser (1979) and 2.3–3.0 in our sample. The sizes that best fit the values of the tadpoles of Blommers-Schlösser (1979) are those of M. melanopleura whose BL is 5.8–7.5 mm and TL is 21.6–28.3 mm for stage 25 and relative length of tail is 2.3–2.9. Furthermore, from the drawing given by Blommers-Schlösser (1979), the direction of the spiracle agrees much with the one of M. melanopleura (directed posterodorsally) rather than with the one of M. opiparis (directed posteriorly). We thus conclude that Blommers-Schlösser’s (1979) tadpole description under the name M. opiparis in fact refers to M. melanopleura , a species which in general occurs sympatrically with M. opiparis over most of eastern Madagascar and in many places appears to be more common.