Pelodryadinae Günther, 1858

Class: Amphibia > Order: Anura > Family: Hylidae > Subfamily: Pelodryadinae
237 species

Nomina inquirenda - Name(s) unassigned to a living or extinct population

Hyla ocellata Péron, 1807, Voy. Decouvertes aux Terres Aust., 1: 407. Holotype: Not stated or known to exist. Type locality: "Paramatta . . . Nouvelle-Hollande". Nomen oblitum.

Hyla rubeola Péron, 1807, Voy. Decouvertes aux Terres Aust., 1: 407. Holotype: Not stated or known to exist. Type locality: "Paramatta . . . Nouvelle-Hollande", New South Wales, Australia. Nomen oblitum.

Hyla ianopoda Péron, 1807, Voy. Decouvertes aux Terres Aust., 1: 407. Holotype: Not stated or known to exist. Type locality: "Paramatta . . . Nouvelle-Hollande", New South Wales, Australia. Nomen oblitum.

Hyla nebulosa Péron, 1807, Voy. Decouvertes aux Terres Aust., 1: 407. Holotype: Not stated or known to exist. Type locality: "Paramatta . . . Nouvelle-Hollande", New South Wales, Australia. Nomen oblitum.

Hyla javana Ahl, 1926, Zool. Anz., 67: 191. Holotype: ZMB, no registration number provided in the original publication. Type locality: "Java", Indonesia. * Litoria javanaIskandar, 1998, Amph. Java Bali: 96. Considered by this author a nomen dubium and possibly not a Litoria. ENGLISH NAME(S): Javan Mossy Tree Frog (Iskandar, 1998, Amph. Java Bali: 96). DISTRIBUTION: Java, Indonesia (see comment). GEOGRAPHIC KEY WORDS: Indonesia. COMMENT: Not associated with a known population of frogs according to Iskandar, 1998, Amph. Java Bali: 96).

English Names

Australian Treefrogs (common usage).

Distribution

The Australo-Papuan region; introduced into New Caledonia, New Hebrides (Vanuatu), Guam, and New Zealand.

Comment

On the basis of work by Tyler, 1971, Univ. Kansas Publ. Mus. Nat. Hist., 19: 319–360, Savage, 1973, in Vial (ed.), Evol. Biol. Anurans: 351–445, considered this group independently derived from a "leptodactylid" stock in Australia (convergent with Hylidae) and placed it in a distinct family, Pelodryadidae (also see Savage, 1986, Proc. Biol. Soc. Washington, 99: 43). This arrangement was followed by Fouquette and Delahoussaye, 1977, J. Herpetol., 11: 387–396; Goin, Goin, and Zug, 1978, Intr. Herpetol., Ed. 3; Laurent, 1986, in Grassé and Delsol (eds.), Traite de Zool., 14: 734–736; and Laurent, 1986 "1985", Alytes, 4: 119–120. Pelodryadidae was considered a subfamily of Hylidae by Duellman, 1977, Das Tierreich, 95: 1–225, an arrangement has been followed by most subsequent authors who recognize this taxon. Duellman, 2001, Hylid Frogs Middle Am., Ed. 2: 770, placed Pelodryadinae as the sister taxon of the remaining hylids. Cogger, Cameron, and Cogger, 1983, Zool. Cat. Aust., Amph. Rept., 1: 35–51, supplied synonymies and literature reviews for the Australian species. Roberts and Watson, 1993, in Glasby et al. (eds.), Fauna Aust., 2A(Amph. Rept.): 35–40, summarized the understanding of systematics at that time. See Savage, 1986, Proc. Biol. Soc. Washington, 99: 42–45, for discussion of nomenclature. Tyler and Davies, 1978, Herpetologica, 34: 219–224, provided evidence for the monophyly of Pelodryadinae and rejected a close relationship with Phyllomedusinae. Immunological relationships of pelodryadines were discussed by Hutchinson and Maxson, 1986, Aust. J. Zool., 34: 575–582, and Hutchinson and Maxson, 1987, Aust. J. Zool., 35: 61–74, and summarized by Roberts and Watson, 1993, in Glasby et al. (eds.), Fauna Aust., 2A(Amph. Rept.): 35–40. Faivovich, Haddad, Garcia, Frost, Campbell, and Wheeler, 2005, Bull. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist., 294, provided substantial molecular evidence that Pelodryadinae is the sister taxon of Phyllomedusinae. Australian species accounts available in Barker, Grigg, and Tyler, 1995, Field Guide Aust. Frogs., Ed. 2. Anstis, 2002, Tadpoles SE Australia, provided keys to tadpoles for the species of southeastern Australia. Frost, Grant, Faivovich, Bain, Haas, Haddad, de Sá, Channing, Wilkinson, Donnellan, Raxworthy, Campbell, Blotto, Moler, Drewes, Nussbaum, Lynch, Green, and Wheeler, 2006, Bull. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist., 297, noted that Cyclorana (monophyletic) and Nyctimystes (polyphyletic) were imbedded within a paraphyletic Litoria and placed Cyclorana as a subgenus within Litoria and placed Nyctimystes in the synonymy of Litoria. Burns and Crayn, 2006, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 39: 573–579, reported on the phylogenetics of the Litoria aurea species group (which they assumed to be monophyletic) based on mt ND4 sequences. Menzies, 2006, Frogs New Guinea & Solomon Is.: 102–168, discussed and provided accounts for the species of New Guinea (as Litoria and Nyctimystes). Bossuyt and Roelants, 2009, in Hedges and Kumar (eds.), Timetree of Life: 357–364, considered Pelodryadinae a distinct family based on the age of its divergence from Phyllomedusidae. Wiens, Kuczynski, Hua, and Moen, 2010, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 55: 871–882, provided somewhat different results based on a larger array of genes, but also demonstrating the paraphyly of "Litoria" (in the old sense) with respect to Nyctimystes (which was found to be nonmonophyletic) and Cyclorana. They found Pelodryadinae to fall into two strongly supported clades, the first clade including the Litoria rubella, Litoria peronii, Litoria dorsalis, Litoria beckii, Litoria arfakiana, Litoria thesaurensis, Litoria bicolor (paraphyletic with respect to the Litoria booroolongensis group), Litoria booroolongensis, Litoria latopalmata (paraphyletic with respect to the Litoria coplandi group), and Litoria coplandi groups. The second clade subdivided into two subclades. One includes Litoria infrafrenata and former Nyctimystes. The other includes nominal Cyclorana and one species of nominal Nyctimystes (Litoria dayi) which is sister of Litoria nannotis. The second subclade includes the Litoria citropa, Litoria caerulea, Litoria chloris, Litoria eucnemis, Litoria lesueurii, Litoria nannotis, Litoria infrafrenata, and Litoria aurea (paraphyletic with respect to Cyclorana) groups. Pyron and Wiens, 2011, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 61: 543–583, largely confirmed this result. Duellman, Marion, and Hedges, 2016, Zootaxa, 4104: 1–109, published a major revision of Pelodryadidae, and made for some serious generic rearrangements in an attempt to render a monophyletic taxonomy, followed here. Their tree and taxonomy is consistent with the tree of pelodryadines provided by Rosauer, Laffan, Crisp, Donnellan, and Cook, 2009, Mol. Ecol., 18: 4061–4072 (their Appendix 1 in supplemental data) who provided a tree of most species of pelodryadines based on 16S and 12S rRNA mtDNA. Schmid, Steinlein, Haaf, Feichtinger, Guttenbach, Bogart, Gruber, Kasahara, Kakampuy, del Pino, Carrillo, Romero-Carvajal, Mahony, King, Duellman, and Hedges, 2018, Schmid, Bogart, and Hedges (eds.), Arboranan Frogs: 1–325, reported on the cytogenetics of Hylidae, Pelodryadidae, and Phyllomedusiae. Dubois, Ohler, and Pyron, 2021, Megataxa, 5: 438–439, recovered a tree of exemplars that the current taxonomy is stable with the surprising example of the position of Litoria thesaurensis (see comment under that taxon). Elias-Costa, Araujo-Vieira, and Faivovich, 2021, Cladistics, 37: 498–517, discussed the evolution of submandibular musculature optimized on the tree of Jetz and Pyron, 2018, Nature Ecol. & Evol., 2: 850–858, which provided morphological synapomorphies of this taxon.   

Contained taxa (237 sp.):

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