Meeting Abstract
With over 300 species, the Asterophryinae subfamily is the largest part of the largest amphibian family in the world. Centered in New Guinea and its satellite islands, it forms an adaptive radiation based on microhabitat use. Historically, intergeneric relationships have been difficult to resolve using established morphometric techniques due to phenotypic convergence. However, recent molecular studies have shed light on deeper nodal relationships beginning with Kohler and Gunther (2006) including 40 species, Rivera et al. 2017 including 155 species, and most recently Tu et al. 2018 including 134 species. Unfortunately, many deeper nodes, including the large genus Oreophryne remained unresolved, which may have resulted from rapidly evolving mitochondrial loci that have proven difficult to sequence for all taxa (CYTB, ND4). In addition, some regions of uncertainty within the tree may be due to gaps in geographic sampling. We conducted additional expeditions to Papua New Guinea and collected over 50 new species of Asterophryne from five locations (1 satellite island and 4 mainland sites). We sequenced the loci used in Rivera et al. 2017 (SIA, BDNF, NCX-1, CYTB and ND4), in some cases designed new primers to amplify the fast evolving loci (ND4) for problematic taxa to complete the dataset. Using Bayesian inference as implemented in MrBayes and Bayesian inference + time calibration as implemented in BEAST, we recovered a substantially more resolved phylogeny. We compared the resulting topologies and nodal support to previous phylogenies and investigated the patterns of ecomorph evolution. This analysis will provide a clearer picture of the patterns of early divergence in this particularly fascinating adaptive radiation of microhylid frogs.
