Afroedura halli, Hewitt, 1935

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. halli ( Hewitt, 1935)

Distribution. Western Lesotho and adjacent southeastern Free State and Eastern Cape provinces, South Africa ( Bates & Bauer 2014a) ( Fig. 4 ).

Remarks. This species was previously considered a subspecies of A. karroica (e.g., Loveridge 1947; Wermuth 1965; Branch et al. 1988; Kluge 1991, 1993) but was elevated to specific status by Bates (1996), although without substantial discussion, and some later authors, especially outside of South Africa, have continued to include it within A. karroica (e.g., Kluge 2001). One subspecies, A. k. wilmoti , has been variously recognized as valid ( FitzSimons 1943) or not ( Loveridge 1947; Branch 1981). Its status is under review ( Bates & Branch 1998). Our sampling included a single specimen resembling A. halli that was deeply divergent from all other samples ( Fig. 1 ), supporting the findings of Makhubo (2013), who found multiple divergent clades within the species. Although the distinctiveness of this specimen in our two-gene analysis may be artificially high due to the absence of RAG1 sequence (Table 2), the>20% ND2 divergence from typical A. halli , which vary among themselves by 0.20–3.02%, supports the view that this represents a different species.

Figures

FIGURE 1. Maximum likelihood phylogram of Afroedura relationships derived from two genes (ND 2, RAG 1). Support values are presented as maximum likelihood bootstraps (MLBS) / Bayesian posterior probabilities (BPP) / parsimony bootstraps (PBS). Only most closely related outgroup taxa are shown. Images (top to bottom) of representative Afroedura species groups: A. hawequensis, A. pondolia, A. karroica, A. loveridgei, A. haackei, A. marleyi, A. granitica sp. nov.

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 (2014) as well as unpublished data.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.