Heleioporus australiacus ( Shaw & Nodder, 1795 )

Mahony, Michael J., Penman, Trent, Bertozzi, Terry, Lemckert, Frank, Bilney, Rohan & Donnellan, Stephen C., 2021, Taxonomic revision of south-eastern Australian giant burrowing frogs (Anura: Limnodynastidae: Heleioporus Gray), Zootaxa 5016 (4), pp. 451-489 : 475

Heleioporus australiacus ( Shaw & Nodder, 1795)

Diagnosis. Assigned to Heleioporus based on the generic definition of Lee (1967) and molecular phylogenetic evidence ( Morgan et al. 2007). Eastern Australian Heleioporus are phylogenetically quite distant from their western Australian congeners with divergence estimated in the late Oligocene to early Miocene ( Morgan et al. 2007). Eastern Australian Heleioporus are readily diagnosed morphologically from their western congeners by the presence of black spines capping the tubercles on the dorsum, sides, and throat, and the uniform chocolate dorsum with yellow or white spots restricted to the sides separating H. australiacus from all other species of Heleioporus except H. barycragus . The length of the metatarsal tubercle distinguishes H. australiacus (less than one half the length of the fourth toe) from H. barycragus (at least one-half the length of the fourth toe) ( Lee 1967). The advertisement calls of H. barycragus consist of a single note compared with multi-pulses in eastern Heleioporus (FrogID application). Contra to Lee (1967), the number and distribution of the pre-orbital papillae in the anterior corner of the eye is quite variable in H. australiacus ( Fig. 8 ) and includes exemplars that closely resemble the condition in H. barycragus illustrated in Figure 5 of Lee (1967).

Heleioporus australiacus comprises two sub-species- H. a. australiacus new combination and H. a. flavopunctatus subsp. nov. which closely resemble each other in most morphological features but can be diagnosed from each other by two features in combination as follows. In H. a. australiacus the tubercles on the flanks have small central white- and yellow-coloured spots which rarely cover the entire tubercle or coalesce with adjacent spots; yellow or white spots occur on the raised tubercles surrounding the cloaca, but they do not coalesce to form a complete ring. In H. a. flavopunctatus tubercles on the flanks have cream and yellow-coloured spots that coalesce with adjacent spots; yellow or white spots on raised tubercles coalesce to from an almost complete ring surrounding the cloaca. Higher mean number of pulses of the note in the advertisement call of H. a. flavopunctatus. Apomorphic character states for at least 16 nucleotide sites in the mitochondrial ND4 gene diagnose the two taxa ( Table 2).

Figures

FIGURE 5. Histograms of linear discriminant (LD) for analyses of morphological variation on transformed morphological data for female and male H. a. australiacus (red), and H. a. flavopunctatus subsp. nov. (blue).

FIGURE 8. Variation in the pre-orbital papillae in anterior corner of eye of eastern Australian Heleioporus. Heleioporus a. australiacus—A) AMS R104952 (neotype) Maroota State Forest, B) AMS R5958 North Sydney, C) AMS R9470 Wollemi National Park, D) AMS R78853 Commodore Heights. H. a. flavopunctatus subsp. nov.—E) AMS R136719 Coolangubra State Forest, F) ANWC A0357 Wadbilliga, G) AMS R136730 Coolangubra State Forest, H) ANWC A1504 Bondi State Forest.