Abstract
Sturnira perla, the new species described herein, is diagnosed as an independent phylogenetic lineage in hypotheses derived from mitochondrial sequences, and shows acceptable distances in terms of genetic divergence. This description also relies on the statistical interpretation of morphological dissimilarity and overlap, and avoids qualitative judgments of character variation. Overall, this new species is characterized by a spherical skull, noticeable round and robust, with pronouncedly curved zygomatic arches. Statistical evidence that supports the discrimination of other species in Sturnira, based on external characters such as pelage coloration or number of hairs, is absent in the literature. In this sense, the geometry of the skull for this newly described species shows the sharpest morphological boundaries, relative to other closely related and sympatric taxa. This new species is likely endemic to the Choco forest, specially at its southern limits. This is an area known for its high levels of endemism. The magnitude of environmental disruption in the Choco and the potential rarity of this new species may be negatively affecting its probability of survival.References
Albuja, V.L. (1999) Murciélagos del Ecuador. 2nd edition. Cicetrónic Cía Ltda, Offset, Quito, Ecuadorm, 288 pp.
Botero, M. (2004) La gringa que se negó a tumbar el bosque. Terra Incognita, 32, 36–41.
Bradley, R.D. & Baker, R.J. (2001) A test of the genetic species concept: Cytochrome-b Sequences and Mammals. Journal of Mammalogy, 82, 960–973.
Brooks, T.M., Mittermeier, R.A., Mittermeier, C.G., da Fonseca, G.A.B., Rylands A.B., Konstant, W.R., Flick, K.P., Pilgrim, J., Oldfield, S., Magin, G. & Hilton-Taylors, C. (2002) Habitat loss and extinction in the hotspots of biodiversity. Conservation Biology, 16, 909–923.
Chapman, F.M. (1917) The distribution of bird-life in Colombia. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, 36, 1–729.
de la Torre, L. (1961) The evolution, variation, and systematics of the Neotropical bats of the genus Sturnira. Ph. D. dissertation. University of Illinois, Urbana, U.S, pp. 146.
Dryden, I.L. & Mardia, K.V. (1998) Multivariate shape analysis. Sankhya, 55, 460–480.
Dumont, E.R. & Herrel, A. (2003) The effects of gape angle and bite point on bite force in bats. The Journal of Experimental Biology, 206, 2117–2123.
Felsenstein, J. (2005) PHYLIP (Phylogeny Inference Package). version 3.6. Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle.
Freeman, P. (1981) Correspondence of food habits and morphology in insectivorous bats. Journal of Mammalogy, 62, 166–173.
Galeano, G., Suárez, S. & Balslev, H. (1998) Vascular plant species count in a wet forest in the Chocó area on the Pacific coast of Colombia. Biodiversity Conservation, 7, 1563–1575.
Gardner, A.L. (2008) Tribe Sturnirini. In: Gardner, A.L. (Ed.), Mammals of South America. Volume 1: Marsupials, Xenarthrans, Shrews, and Bats. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 363–376.
Gentry, A.H. (1993) Riqueza de especies y composición florística de las comunidades de plantas de la región del Chocó: una actualización. In: Leyva, P. (Ed.), Colombia Pacífico, Tomo I. FEN Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia, pp. 201–219.
Gift, N. & Stevens, P.F. (1997) Vagaries in the delimitation of character states in quantitative variation: An experimental study. Systematic Biology, 46, 112–125.
Graham, J.W. & Hofer, S.M. (2000) Multiple Imputation in Multivariate Research. In: Little, T., Schnabel, K. & Baumert, J. (Eds.), Modeling Longitudinal and Multilevel Data: Practical Issues, Applied Approaches and Specific Examples. Lawrence Ellbaum Associates, Mahwah, New Jersey, pp. 201–218.
Guindon, S. & Gascuel, O. (2003) A simple, fast, and accurate algorithm to estimate large phylogenies by maximum likelihood. Systematic Biology, 52, 696–704.
Hayek, L.C., Heyer, W.R. & Gascon, C. (2001) Frog morphometrics: a cautionary tale. Alytes, 18, 153−177.
Huelsenbeck, J.P. & Ronquist, F. (2001) MRBAYES: Bayesian inference of phylogeny. Bioinformatics, 17, 754−755.
Iudica, C.A. (2000) Systematic revision of the neotropical fruit bats of the genus Sturnira: A molecular and morphological approach. PhD dissertation thesis. University of Florida. Gainesville, USA, 284 pp.
Jarrín–V., P. & Kunz, T.H. (2008) Taxonomic history of the genus Anoura (Chiroptera: Phyllostomidae) with insights into the challenges of morphological species delimitation. Acta Chiropterologica, 10, 257–269.
Jarrín-V., P., Flores-C., C. & Salcedo-Q, J. (2010) Morphological variation in the Short-tailed Fruit Bat (Carollia) in Ecuador, with comments on the practical and philosophical aspects of boundaries among species. Integrative Zoology, in press.
Kimura, M. (1980) A simple method for estimating evolutionary rate of base substitutions through comparative studies of nucleotide sequences. Journal of Molecular Evolution, 16, 111–120.
Little, R.J.A. & Rubin, D.B. (2002) Statistical Analysis with Missing Data. 2nd edition. John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey, 408 pp.
Mayden, R.L. (1997) A hierarchy of species concepts: the denouement in the saga of the species problem. In: Claridge, M., Darwah, H.A. & Wilson, H.A. (Eds.), Species: The units of Biodiversity. Chapman & Hall, London, pp. 381–424.
Mayr, E. (1959) Typological versus Population Thinking. In: Meggers, B.J. (Ed.), Evolution and Anthropology: A Centennial Appraisal. The Anthropological Society of Washington, Washington, pp. 1−10.
McCarthy, T.J., Albuja, L.A. & Alberico, M.S. (2006) A new species of Chocoan Sturnira (Chiroptera: Phyllostomidae: Stenodermatinae) from Western Ecuador and Colombia. Annals of the Carnegie Museum, 75, 97–110.
Mittermeier, R.A., Myers, N. & Mittermeier, C.G. (Eds.) (1999) Hotspots: Earth’s Biologically Richest and Most Endangered Terrestrial Ecoregions. Cemax S.A., Mexico City, 432 pp.
Muchhala, N. & Jarrín–V., P. (2002) Flower pollination by bats in cloud forests of Ecuador. Biotropica, 34, 387–395.
Myers, N., Mittermeier, R.A., Mittermeier, C.G., da Fonseca, G.A.B. & Kent, J. (2000) Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities. Nature, 403, 853–858.
Olson, C.L. (1974) Comparative robustness of six tests in multivariate analysis of variance. Journal of the American Statistician Association, 69, 894–908.
Owen, R.D. (1987) Phylogenetic analyses of the bat subfamily Stenodermatinae (Mammalia: Chiroptera). Special Publications of The Museum, Texas Tech University, 26, 1–65.
Pacheco, V. & Patterson, B.D. (1991) Phylogeny relationships of the New World bat genus Sturnira (Chiroptera: Phyllostomidae). Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, 206, 101–121.
Pimmentel, R.A. (1992) An introduction to ordination, principal components analysis and discriminant analysis. In: Sorenson, J.T. & Foottit, R. (Eds.), Ordination in the study of morphology, evolution and systematics of insects. Elsevier Science Publication, Amsterdam, pp. 11–28.
Poe, S. & Wiens, J.J. (2000) Character selection and the methodology of morphological phylogenetics. In: Wiens, J. (Ed.), Phylogenetic Analysis of Morphological Data. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, pp. 20–36.
Popper, K. (1934) Logik der Forschung: Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft. J. Springer, Vienna, Austria, 248 pp.
Posada, D. (2008) jModelTest: Phylogenetic Model Averaging. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 25, 1253–1256.
Rival, L. (2003) The meanings of forest governance in Esmeraldas, Ecuador. Oxford Development Studies, 31, 479–501.
Rohlf, F.J. (1993) Relative warp analysis and an example of its application to the analysis of mosquito wings. In: Marcus, L.F., Bello, E. & García Valdecasas, A. (Eds.), Contributions to Morphometrics. Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (CSIC), Madrid, 8:1–264, pp. 131–159.
Rohlf, F.J. (1999) Shape statistics: Procrustes superimpositions and tangent spaces. Journal of Classification, 16, 197–223.
Rohlf, F.J. & Marcus, L.F. (1993) A revolution in morphometrics. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 8, 129–132.
Rohlf, F.J., Loy, A. & Corti, M. (1996) Morphometric analysis of old world Talpidae (Mammalia: Insectivora) using partial-warp scores. Systematic Biology, 45, 344–362.
Rohlf, F.J. & Bookstein, F.L. (2003) Computing the uniform component of shape variation. Systematic Biology, 53, 66–69.
Ronquist, F. & Huelsenbeck, J.P. (2003) MRBAYES 3: Bayesian phylogenetic inference under mixed models. Bioinformatics, 19, 1572–1574.
Rudel, T.K. (2000) Organizing for sustainable development: conservation organizations and the struggle to protect tropical rain forests in Esmeraldas, Ecuador. Ambio, 29, 78–82.
Segura, S. (2006) Diccionario por raíces del latín y de las voces derivadas. Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao, España, 1356 pp.
Sierra, R. & Stallings, J. (1998) The dynamics and social organization of tropical deforestation in northwest Ecuador, 1983-1995. Human Ecology, 26, 135–161.
Sierra, R., Campos, F. & Chamberlin, J. (2002) Assessing biodiversity conservation priorities: ecosystem risk and representativeness in continental Ecuador. Landscape Urban Plann, 59, 95–110.
SPSS Inc. (2008) SPSS 17.0 for Windows. Chicago, Illinois.
Stevens, J. (2002) Applied Multivariate Statistics for the Social Sciences. 4th edition. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey, USA, 720 pp.
Thiele, K. (1993) The holy grail of the perfect character: the cladistic treatment of morphometric data. Cladistics, 9, 275–304.
Thompson, D.W. (1917) On Growth and Form. Cambridge University Press, London, UK, 793 pp.
Tirira, D.S. (1999) Mamíferos del Ecuador. Publicación Especial, Museo de Zoología, Centro de Biodiversidad y Ambiente, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, 2, 1−392.
Tye, M. (1994) Sorites Paradoxes and the Semantics of Vagueness. In: Tomberlin J.E. (Ed.), Philosophical Perspectives 8: Logic and Language. Ridgeview, Atascadero, California, pp. 189–206.
Villalobos, F. & Valerio, A.A. (2002) The phylogenetic relationships of the bat genus Sturnira Gray, 1842 (Chiroptera: Phyllostomidae). Mammalian Biology, 67, 268–275.