IDEA   23902
INSTITUTO DE DIVERSIDAD Y ECOLOGIA ANIMAL
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Using individuals as terminal taxa in morphological phylogenies to infer species boundaries
Autor/es:
CARRASCO, P. A.; GRAZZIOTIN, F. G.; MATTONI, C. I.
Lugar:
Buenos Aires
Reunión:
Congreso; XXXV Annual Meeting of the Willie Hennig Society; 2016
Institución organizadora:
Willie Hennig Society
Resumen:
Integrative taxonomy, a conceptual framework that considers species as hypotheses, seeks to support or reject these hypotheses through different lines of evidence. In this study we performed morphological phylogenetic analyses using individuals as terminal taxa to evaluate the specific status of an endemic and threatened population of pitvipers of the Pacific versant of the Andes of Peru. This population has been historically assigned to Bothrops pictus Tschudi, 1845 and B. roedingeri Mertens, 1942; but morphological differences among both species and their distribution were not clear, and some has suggested the synonymization of B. roedingeri with B. pictus. We used continuous and discrete characters of specimens representative of the entire range of the population, and performed parsimony analyses under equal and implied weighting. The results showed a monophyletic group of individuals from Ica, Arequipa and Ayacucho, in southwestern Peru, area that includes the type locality of B. roedingeri. The results were confronted with those of phylogenetic analyses of molecular data and statistical analyses of morphometric data. All recovered the same group, thus indicating that B. roedingeri might be a valid species to be assigned to the southern population, instead of the coastal population as formerly thought. This study demonstrates that using individuals as terminal taxa in phylogenetic analyses of morphological data can be a useful tool for assessing species boundaries in an integrative approach.