Makalata, Husson, 1978

Voss, Robert S., Fleck, David W. & Jansa, Sharon A., 2019, Mammalian Diversity And Matses Ethnomammalogy In Amazonian Peru Part 5. Rodents, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2024 (466), pp. 1-180 : 121-123

Makalata “species 5”

Figure 51

VOUCHER MATERIAL (TOTAL = 4): Nuevo San Juan (AMNH 268270; MUSM 11241, 11242, 15327).

UNVOUCHERED OBSERVATIONS: None.

IDENTIFICATION: Specimens of Makalata from the Yavarí-Ucayali interfluve have dorsal pelage composed of soft fur mixed with strong, flat, sharp spines. The dorsal coloration (best preserved in MUSM 11242) is grizzled tawny over the middle back and hips but grayish brown on the crown of the head, nape, forelegs, shoulders, and flanks; by contrast, the nose and eye rings are reddish, as is the fur at the base of the tail. The ventral pelage is grizzled grayish brown and does not contrast sharply in color with the dorsal pelage. The visibly scaly tail is shorter than the combined length of the head and body and lacks a terminal tuft of long hairs. Digits II–V of the forefoot are provided with strong, sharp claws, and digit III is about the same length as digit IV. The maxillary toothrows are parallel, and the labial flexi are patent. In these and other morphological traits (including external and craniodental measurements; table 37), our specimens resemble the descriptions of M. macrura (Wagner, 1842) in Patton et al. (2000) and Emmons and Patton (2015b), but the application of Wagner’s name to our material is problematic.

Patton et al. (2000) and Emmons and Patton (2015b) recognized only two valid species of Makalata : M. macrura in western Amazonia and M. didelphoides (Desmarest, 1817) in eastern Amazonia. 35 This dichotomy was based on

35 A third name, Makalata obscura (Wagner, 1840) was listed by Emmons and Patton (2015b) as though it applied to a valid species, but by their own admission it is a nomen dubium.

the discovery of strongly supported mtDNA clades with geographic distributions corresponding to those attributed to the species, and by plausible inferences about the application of names based on known or presumed type localities. More recently, however, analyses of karyotypes and molecular data ( Miranda et al., 2021) suggest the existence of numerous morphologically cryptic species of Makalata . Although Miranda et al.’s phylogenetic analyses of cytochrome b sequences recovered strongly supported eastern and western Amazonian clades—consistent with Patton et al.’s (2000) results—one sequence from a specimen collected near the type locality of M. macrura (on the right bank of the lower Rio Madeira) was recovered as part of a haplogroup within the eastern Amazonian clade, whereas a sequence from the Yavarí-Ucayali interfluve (obtained from MUSM 15327) 36 together with Patton et al.’s (2000) sequences from the Rio Juruá were recovered as a haplogroup (“species 5”) belonging to the western clade. Based on sequences that we downloaded from GenBank, the uncorrected average difference between “species 5” (represented by L23356, L23357, MW965251, and MW965235) and M. macrura (as restricted by Miranda et al., 2021: represented by MW965236, MW965237, MW965242, and MW965243) is about 14% at the cytochrome b locus.

Based on these analytic results, the name Makalata macrura cannot be applied to our material.

36 Confusingly, Miranda et al. (2021: table 2) incorrectly associated MUSM 15327 and its cytochrome b sequence (MW965251) with a Brazilian locality, and they also incorrectly attributed the sequence to Patton et al. (2000). As noted above, MUSM 15327 was collected at Nuevo San Juan, and its sequence was not among those analyzed by Patton et al. (2000: table 53).