Better late than never: Reassessment of Peruvian Tachymenini (Squamata: Serpentes) after more than half a century

AGUILAR PUNTRIANO, C.; LEHR, E.; CAPITO, J.; LUNDBERG, M.; TORRES, C.; AVILA, L.J.; MORANDO, M.; SITES, J. W. JR.

New Orleans

Congreso; Joint Meeting of Ichtyologists and Herpetologists; 2016

Southeastern Lousiana University

Integrative taxonomy is becoming a preferred approach to delimiting speciesboundaries by including different empirical data sets and multiple methods. In thisstudy we use a sequential evaluation of multiple kinds of evidence to test hypotheses of species limits in a hypothetic-deductive framework. We used morphological (meristic & morphometric) and molecular (mitochondrial & nuclear) data to reassess species boundaries in the Tachymenis peruviana complex, a group of species not studied since Walker’s 1945 monograph. One population of Tachymenis Wiegmann, 1834 from central Peru differs from T. peruviana Wiegman, 1834 and T. tarmensis Walker, 1945 in color pattern, as well as ventral and subcaudal scale counts, and may represent a new species. Our phylogenetic analyses recover T. tarmensis, a species originally described from one specimen and only known from a single locality, external to the T. peruviana clade, extending southward its geographic distribution. Finally another population from central Peru and morphologically similar to Tachymenis, is phylogenetically nested within the genus Thamnodynastes Wagler, 1830 and most probably represents a new Andean linage of this genus.