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Rana cerigensis Beerli, Hotz, Tunner, Heppich, and Uzzell 1994

Peter Beerli

Table of Contents

Description
Distribution
Voice
Synonyms
References

Description

Excerpt of the original description: A member of the western Palearctic water frog group, distinguished from the Palearctic brown frog group by paired external lateral vocal sacs in males, extension of webbing of feet to the toe tips, absence of a black face mask from the eye to the tympanum, and presence of dark mottling on the inner thigh surfaces; distinguished from the eastern Palearctic water frog group by protein electrophoresis: among the loci sharing no alleles with eastern Palearctic water frogs, those at aGDH, LDH-B, sMDH, MPI, and 6PGDH are shared with one to several species of western Palearctic water frogs, whereas those at LDH-A, mMDH, and sSOD are shared with all. Rana cerigensis is discriminated from all other western Palearctic water frog species by a unique multilocus combination of electrophoretically detected alleles: among alleles shared with other species, our samples are fixed for mACO b, sACO b, ALB b, CK-A b, EST-6 b, [[alpha]]GDH b, GPI d, sIDH b, mIDH c, LDH-B a, sMDH b, MPI q; 6PGDH e, PGM-2 d, sSOD a. Except that they segregate in the water frog population of Rhodos, Rana cerigensis has unique alleles, fixed in our sample, for sAAT (l) and AHH (c). Morphologically (Fig. 3), among western Palearctic water frogs Rana cerigensis is medium-sized (mean ± SD of body length 54.5±12.2 mm for 8 adults). Tibia relatively long (body length/tibia length 1.85±0.08, N=8). Callus internus relatively short (body length/callus internus length 18.5±2.2, N=7), of medium height (callus length/height 3.2±0.3, N=3). Digitus primus medium-sized (body length/digitus primus length 7.4±1.1, N=7; digitus primus length/callus internus length 2.5±0.3, N=7). Dorsal coloration light brownish gray to olive, with or without light brown spots. No vertebral stripe in our samples. Venter cream-colored with gray mottling. Vocal sacs of males dark gray. The advertisement calls of males (Fig. 2B,D; subsequent values are mean±SD and refer to water temperature 20°C, air temperature 18°C) are produced in series, with call durations of 341±44 msec and very short intercall intervals (276±54 msec). The calls consist of a relatively low number (6.0±0.9) of pulse groups, with durations of 57±5 msec and group intervals of 41±15 msec, that comprise a large number (>100) of pulses. In contrast to Rana cretensis, no further level of amplitude subdivision of the pulse groups was observed.

Distribution

The distribution of this species is restricted to Karpathos and Rhodos (Greece). It is the only water frog species known so far on these islands. Problems concerning Rhodos are discussed in Beerli 1994

Voice

The following recordings a short sequences of longer recordings. These files are size reduced (MULAW 8-bit encoded) from 16-bit encoded sound files. [will come]

Synonyms

Valid name: Rana (Pelophylax) cerigensis Beerli, Hotz, Tunner, Heppich, and Uzzell 1994 Synonyms: -

References

Beerli H. Hotz, H. Tunner, S. Heppich, and T. Uzzell. 1994. Two new water frog 
       species from the Aegean islands Crete and Karpathos 
       (Amphibia, Salientia, Ranidae).  Notulae Naturae, Academy of 
       Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 470:1-9.
       [see full text]
Beerli, P. 1994. Genetic isolation and calibration of an average protein clock in 
       western Palearctic water frogs of the Aegean region. Dissertation 
       Universität Zurich 1994. [Summary]

Title Illustration

Rana cerigensis (The photo represents the paratype MHNG 2543.93).

Photographs copyright © 1995, Peter Beerli.

About the map

The map is a transverse Mercator projection and was created with GMT 3.0 ( Wessel and Smith, 1995) and postprocessed in Virtuoso on a NeXT, and then converted from eps to gif. [If you need maps, take a look at GMT 3.0 and create them yourself]

About this page

Peter Beerli

e-mail: beerli@scs.fsu.edu.
Genetics 357360
University of Washington
Seattle WA 98195-7360
USA


Page copyright © 1995 Peter Beerli
Last modified 20 December 1995

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