Meeting Abstract

27.5  Wednesday, Jan. 5  Molecular phylogenetics of papuan microhylids RIVERA, J.A.*; BUTLER, M.; Univ of Hawaii, Manoa julior@hawaii.edu

Papua New Guinea is one of the most biodiverse places on earth containing 3% of the world’s animal and plant diversity. This large island has remained, for the most part, unstudied until recent expeditions have shown that diversity has been underestimated by an order of magnitude, especially the herpetofauna. A taxa of particular interest is the Microhylidae, a frog family that is composed of 19 genera and roughly 217 species. This large family demonstrates disparate lifestyles and micro-habitat use that has led to homoplasy. This has made it difficult to determine relationships which posses a problem since microhylids have the potential to become model organisms for such evolutionary concepts as adaptive radiation and ecologically driven niche divergence. Unfortunately, the lack of a robust phylogeny makes it difficult to develop a comprehensive research program for such a diverse group. Here I have sequenced both nuclear and mitochondrial genes with varying degrees of mutation rates so that a robust phylogeny can be produced. I used Parsimony, Bayesian Inference and Maximum Likelihood to construct the phylogenies and compared them to determine congruence in bifurcations. The trees show that many of the congenerics do cluster together, though there are exceptions. Some genera are clustering with other taxa that were previously thought not not be related. This may imply that reclassification is in order.