Sistemática filogenética de Physalaemus Fitzinger (Anura: Leptodactylidae) combinando dados moleculares e morfológicos

Abstract

Physalaemus is a Neotropical genus of Leptodactylidae composed by 48 species, being the largest genera in the subfamily Leiuperinae. Recently, the first phylogenetic analysis was peformed to test the relationships among the species within the genus, using only molecular data. The present study was designed to review the systematics of Physalaemus, by performing a total evidence analysis representing as many species as possible, adding to the infered clades potentially informative morphological characters. Also, to evaluate the effects of the addition of phenotipic characters in an analysis with predominantly molecular characters, and investigate the evolutionary history of some morphological characters. My total evidence analysis included 200 morphological characters and molecular data from mitochondrial and nuclear genes for 39 described species and one new species of Physalaemus, 7 of other Leiuperinae, representing all the remaining genus of this subfamily, and 10 species of the other Leptodactylidae subfamilies. Two analyses were performed in order to accomplish the main goals, one using only molecular data and another concatenating the molecular and morphological data (total evidece analysis), both under the same parameters with the Maximum Parsimony criterion. All of the groups proposed by Lourenço et al. (2015) were recovered with high support in both analyses. The morphological data improved the resolution of several clades, as the strict consensus tree from the analysis using only molecular data presented more polytomies when compared to the the strict consensus tree of the Total Evidence analysis, and several morphological synapomorphies supported all recovered clades. Although, the relationships among the Physalaemus groups of species remain to be elucidaded.