Eleutherodactylus nitidus (Peters, 1870)

Grünwald, Christoph I., Reyes-Velasco, Jacobo, Franz-Chávez, Héctor, Morales-Flores, Karen I., Ahumada-Carrillo, Ivan T., Rodriguez, Christopher M. & Jones, Jason M., 2021, Two new species of Eleutherodactylus (Anura: Eleutherodactylidae) from Southern Mexico, with comments on the taxonomy of related species and their advertisement calls, Amphibian & Reptile Conservation (e 272) 15 (1), pp. 1-35 : 16

Molecular Analysis of the Eleutherodactylus nitidus Species Group

The molecular phylogeny based on the mitochondrial rRNA 16S recovered a well-supported Eleutherodactylus nitidus species group (posterior probability (pp) 1; Figs. 12 and S 1), which is sister to the E. modestus group as defined by Grünwald et al. (2018). As with previous phylogenies of the group based on 16S, some of the intermediate nodes in the phylogeny are not well supported (pp <0.5), and we have collapsed all nodes below this value.

In the Eleutherodactylus nitidus species group, we recovered two main clades. The first one is composed of E. pipilans , E. erythrochomus , and E. nebulosus , while the second group includes all the other species. In the second group, many of the intermediate nodes have little to no support. However, individual species do show strong support (pp = 1) in most cases, including E. dilatus , E. sentinelus , E. maurus , and E. syristes , while E. maculabialis has a posterior support of 0.86.

All the remaining species in the group form a second, well-supported clade (pp =0.99). In this clade, we recovered an early split between Eleutherodactylus albolabris and the other species, which include E. orarius , E. petersi , E. nitidus , and a hitherto undescribed form from Jalisco and Nayarit ( Fig. 13). We refrain from describing the western-most form at this time, as material from the type locality of E. petersi is unavailable, so the relationship of the western form with E. petersi remains unclear.

We believe that a more detailed study of the taxa related to E. nitidus is needed, when more thorough sampling is available and employing more populationlevel specific tools, such as genome-wide SNP data, in order to better understand the patterns of gene-flow and introgression.