Rana lini, Chou, 1999

Chuaynkern, Yodchaiy, Ohler, Annemarie, Inthara, Chantip & Duengkae, Prateep, 2010, A Revision Of Species In The Subgenus Nidirana Dubois, 1992, With Special Attention To The Identity Of Specimens Allocated To Rana Adenopleura Boulenger, 1909, And Rana Chapaensis (Bourret, 1937) (Amphibia: Anura: Ranidae) From Thailand And Laos, Raffles Bulletin of Zoology 58 (2), pp. 291-310 : 301

Comparison with Rana lini and allocation of the specimens from Thailand

The low sample-size of adult males of Rana lini (two adult males) does not allow us to compare statistically with other species of Nidirana . Hence, we excluded these two specimens from the analysis. However, based on morphological comparison, this species should be placed in the R. adenopleura group by the following combination of characters: body slender, spinules on posterior half of back only, nest construction behavior absent.

As presented above, it is evident that the specimens from Thailand are quite different from most species from those Rana okinavana and Rana pleuraden groups but should be placed in the Rana adenopleura group (see Table 1 and Fig. 1 ). It is very difficult to differentiate the specimens from Thailand from Rana lini based on external morphological characters presented above. The statistical comparisons of two taxa are not considered here due to the low samplesized should be lead us misinterpretation. However, the body size of adult male specimens from Thailand (53.1–57.9 mm, n = 10) is larger than R. lini (44.1–46.7 mm, n = 2). If the measurements of body size given by Chou (1999) are included, the size of specimens from Thailand falls into the range (44.2–61.2 mm, n = 9) of Chou’s measurement. Therefore, we re-allocated here those specimens from Thailand to R. lini .

Figures

Fig. 1. Phenogram representing morphometrical similarities between species of Nidirana based on the number of significantly different measurements. ADEN = Rana adenopleura, CALD = R. caldwelli, CHAP = R. chapaensis, DAUN = R. daunchina, OKIN = R. okinavana, PLEU = R. pleuraden and THAI = Thai specimens.