Skip to main content Skip to main navigation menu Skip to site footer
Responsive image
Issue: Vol. 5463 No. 4: 7 Jun. 2024
Type: Article
Published: 2024-06-07
DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.5463.4.1
Page range: 451-478
Abstract views: 150
PDF downloaded: 3

Two new species of South Asian Cnemaspis Strauch, 1887 (Squamata: Gekkonidae) from the far northern peaks of the Western Ghats, India

Thackeray Wildlife Foundation; Mumbai; 400051; India; Department of Zoology; Shivaji University; Kolhapur; 416004; India
Thackeray Wildlife Foundation; Mumbai; 400051; India
Thackeray Wildlife Foundation; Mumbai; 400051; India
Thackeray Wildlife Foundation; Mumbai; 400051; India
Thackeray Wildlife Foundation; Mumbai; 400051; India
Department of Zoology; Shivaji University; Kolhapur; 416004; India
Reptilia Asia biodiversity hotspot dwarf geckos integrative taxonomy phylogeny species complex

Abstract

We describe two new species of South Asian Cnemaspis from far northern peaks of the Northern Western Ghats of Maharashtra, India. The two new species are the most northernly distributed representatives of the girii clade and are phylogenetically and morphologically allied to C. uttaraghati. The new species are 15.0% divergent from C. uttaraghati in pairwise uncorrected ND2 sequence data, 9.9 % from each other, and over 17.5–18.8% from other members of the girii clade. The two new species can easily be distinguished from most members of the girii clade by a combination of non-overlapping morphological characters such as body size (maximum snout to vent length 35–43 mm), low number of dorsal tubercle rows (6–11), having irregular paravertebral tubercles, and high subdigital lamellae counts; and from each other and C. uttaraghati by the number of midventral scales across belly, the number of subdigital lamellae, and the number of poreless scales separating series of femoral pores. The new species and C. uttaraghati are distributed within 10–25 km of each other, providing an example of extreme micro-endemism in the Northern Western Ghats.

 

References

  1. Agarwal, I., Thackeray, T., Pal, S. & Khandekar, A. (2020) Granite boulders act as deep-time climate refugia: a Miocene divergent clade of rupicolous Cnemaspis Strauch, 1887 (Squamata: Gekkonidae) from the Mysore Plateau, India, with descriptions of three new species. Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research, 58 (4), 1234–1261. https://doi.org/10.1111/jzs.12391
  2. Giri, V.B. (2008) A new rock dwelling Hemidactylus (Squamata: Gekkonidae) from Maharashtra, India. Hamadryad, 32, 25–33.
  3. Kalyaanamoorthy, S., Minh, B.Q., Wong, T.K.F., von Haeseler, A. & Jermiin, L.S. (2017) ModelFinder: Fast model selection for accurate phylogenetic estimates. Nature Methods, 14, 87–589. https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.4285
  4. Khandekar, A., Gaitonde, N. & Agarwal, I. (2019a) Two new Cnemaspis Strauch, 1887 (Squamata: Gekkonidae) from the Shevaroy massif, Tamil Nadu, India, with a preliminary ND2 phylogeny of Indian Cnemaspis. Zootaxa, 4609 (1), 68–100. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4609.1.3
  5. Khandekar, A., Thackeray, T. & Agarwal, I. (2019b) Two more new species of Cnemaspis Strauch, 1887 (Squamata: Gekkonidae) from the northern Western Ghats, Maharashtra, India. Zootaxa, 4656 (1), 236–250. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4656.1.2
  6. Khandekar, A., Thackeray, T. & Agarwal, I. (2021a) A novel small-bodied rupicolous Cnemaspis Strauch, 1887 (Squamata: Gekkonidae) from the northern Western Ghats, Maharashtra, India, with comments on the status of C. indraneildasii, Bauer 2000. Zootaxa, 4969 (2), 331–350. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4969.2.6
  7. Khandekar, A., Thackeray, T. & Agarwal, I. (2021b) A cryptic new species of rupicolous Hemidactylus Goldfuss, 1820 (Squamata: Gekkonidae) allied to H. aaronbaueri Giri, 2008 from the northern Western Ghats of Maharashtra, India. Zootaxa, 5020 (3), 434–456. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5020.3.2
  8. Khandekar, A., Gaikwad, S.M., Thackeray, T., Gangalmale, S. & Agarwal, I. (2024) A preliminary taxonomic revision of the girii clade of South Asian Cnemaspis Strauch, 1887 (Squamata: Gekkonidae) with the description of four new species from southern Maharashtra, India. Zootaxa, 5429 (1), 1–114. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5429.1.1
  9. Lanfear, R., Calcott, B., Ho, S.Y.W. & Guindon, S. (2012) Partitionfinder: combined selection of partitioning schemes and substitution models for phylogenetic analysis. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 29 (6), 1695–1701. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/mss020
  10. Lanfear, R., Frandsen, P.B., Wright, A.M., Senfeld, T. & Calcott, B. (2016) PartitionFinder 2: new methods for selecting partitioned models of evolution for molecular and morphological phylogenetic analyses. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 34 (3), 772–773. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msw260
  11. Macey, J.R., Larson, A., Ananjeva, N.B., Fang, Z. & Papenfuss, T.J. (1997) Two novel gene orders and the role of light-strand replication in rearrangement of the vertebrate mitochondrial genome. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 14 (1), 91–104. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.molbev.a025706
  12. Mirza, Z.A., Pal, S., Bhosale, H.S. & Sanap, R.V. (2014) A new species of gecko of the genus Cnemaspis Strauch, 1887 from the Western Ghats, India. Zootaxa, 3815 (4), 494–506. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.3815.4.2
  13. Nguyen, L., Schmidt, H.A., von Haeseler, A. & Minh, B.Q. (2015) IQ­TREE: A fast and effective stochastic algorithm for estimating maximum likelihood phylogenies. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 32 (1), 268–274. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msu300
  14. Pal, S., Mirza, Z.A., Dsouza, P. & Shanker, K. (2021) Diversifying on the Ark: multiple new endemic lineages of dwarf geckos from the Western Ghats provide insights into the systematics and biogeography of South Asian Cnemaspis. Zoological Research, 42 (6), 675−691. https://doi.org/10.24272/j.issn.2095-8137.2021.074
  15. Ronquist, F. & Huelsenbeck, J.P. (2003) MrBayes 3: Bayesian phylogenetic inference under mixed models. Bioinformatics, 19 (12), 1572–1574. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btg180
  16. Sayyed, A. (2023) A New dwarf gecko species (Squamata: Gekkonidae: Cnemaspis) from the Northern Western Ghats of India. Taprobanica, 12 (2), 48–58. https://doi.org/10.47605/tapro.v12i2.307
  17. Sayyed, A., Pyron, R.A. & Dahanukar, N. (2016) Cnemaspis flaviventralis, a new species of gecko (Squamata: Gekkonidae) from the Western Ghats of Maharashtra, India. Journal of Threatened Taxa, 8 (14), 9619–9629. https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.2599.8.14.9619-9629
  18. Sayyed, A., Pyron, R.A. & Dileepkumar, R. (2018) Four new species of the genus Cnemaspis Strauch, (Sauria: Gekkonidae) from the Northern Western Ghats, India. Amphibian and Reptile Conservation, 12, 1–29.
  19. Sayyed, A., Cyriac, V.P., Pardeshi, A. & Sulakhe, S. (2021) Dwarfs of the fortress: A new cryptic species of dwarf gecko of the genus Cnemaspis Strauch, 1887 (Squamata, Gekkonidae) from Rajgad fort in the Northern Western Ghats of Maharashtra, India. Evolutionary Systematics, 5, 25–38. https://doi.org/10.3897/evolsyst.5.62929
  20. Stamatakis, A. (2014) RAxML version 8: a tool for phylogenetic analysis and post-analysis of large phylogenies. Bioinformatics, 30 (9), 1312–1313. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btu033
  21. Tamura, K., Peterson, D., Peterson, N., Stecher, G., Nei, M. & Kumar, S. (2011) MEGA5: Molecular evolutionary genetics analysis using maximum likelihood, evolutionary distance, and maximum parsimony methods. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 28 (10), 2731–2739. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msr121
  22. Thompson, J.D., Higgins, D.G. & Gibson, T.J. (1994) CLUSTAL W: Improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence weighting, positions-specific gap penalties and weight matrix choice. Nucleic Acids and Research, 22 (22), 4673–4680. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/22.22.4673
  23. Trifinopoulos, J., Nguyen, L.-T., von Haeseler, A. & Minh, B.Q. (2016) W­IQTREE: A fast online phylogenetic tool for maximum likelihood analysis. Nucleic Acids Research, 44 (W1), W232–W235. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkw256