Afroedura pondolia, Hewitt, 1925

Jacobsen, Niels H. G., Kuhn, Arianna L., Jackman, Todd R. & Bauer, Aaron M., 2014, A phylogenetic analysis of the southern African gecko genus Afroedura Loveridge (Squamata: Gekkonidae), with the description of nine new species from Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces of South Africa, Zootaxa 3846 (4), pp. 451-501 : 471

A. pondolia ( Hewitt, 1925)

( Fig. 3 E)

Distribution. Low to middle elevations of the eastern Eastern Cape Province and southern and central KwaZulu- Natal ( Bauer 2014i) ( Fig. 4 ).

Remarks. Afroedura pondolia was long considered polytypic. Onderstall (1984) recognized five nonnominotypic subspecies, all of which are here considered valid species: A. marleyi , A. major , A. multiporis , A. haackei , and A. langi , and this interpretation was long accepted by most authors (e.g., Branch et al. 1988; Kluge 1991, 1993, 2001). All of the new species described herein would also have been placed in A. pondolia under Onderstall’s concept of the species. To avoid confusion with the A. pondolia group of earlier authors, we have here used the term A. nivaria group for the clade to which A. pondolia belongs.

Figures

FIGURE 3. Representatives of the species groups of Afroedura. (A) A. hawequensis group: A. hawequensis (Limietberg, Western Cape, South Africa); (B) A. transvaalica group: A. bogerti (Iona National Park, Namibe Province, Angola); (C) A. transvaalica group: A. transvaalica (30 km west of Musina, Limpopo, South Africa); (D) A. africana group: A. karroica (Sneeuberg Mountains, Eastern Cape, South Africa); (E) A. nivari a group: A. pondolia (Durban, ZwaZulu-Natal, South Africa). Note the strongly verticillate original tail base in A. transvaalica and the bulbous regenerated tail in A. hawequensis. Photo A: Marius Burger, Photos B – C, E: Johan Marais, Photo D: Stuart V. Nielsen.

FIGURE 4. Map of southern Africa showing the approximate distributional ranges of previously described species of Afroedura. Red dots represent localities sampled for the genetic portion of the study. Ranges based on Branch (1998) and Bates et al. (2014) as well as unpublished data. Taxon names follow the conclusions of this paper. Area demarcated by a dashed line is presented in more detail in Figure 6.