SPHENOPHRYNE - American Museum of Natural History
SPHENOPHRYNE - American Museum of Natural History
SPHENOPHRYNE - American Museum of Natural History
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2000 ZWEIFEL: PARTITION OF <strong>SPHENOPHRYNE</strong><br />
117<br />
Fig. 76. Audiospectrograms <strong>of</strong> calls <strong>of</strong> Sphenophryne cornuta recorded in Western Province, Papua<br />
New Guinea. A. Possible territorial calls recorded at Finalbin, July 27, 1987 (see text); 300-Hz filter,<br />
time scale <strong>of</strong> wave forms 6 that <strong>of</strong> spectrogram, air 20.3C, voucher specimen AMNH A130549,<br />
AMNH Herpetology tape reel no. 252. B. One complete advertisement call recorded by Ian Redmond<br />
at the junction <strong>of</strong> the Strickland and Rentoul rivers, Nov. 14, 1979; 300-Hz filter, no temperature, voucher<br />
specimen BMNH 1980.673, British Library <strong>of</strong> Wildlife Sounds No. 12274.<br />
S. robusta, possibly a derived condition, I see<br />
no objective way <strong>of</strong> arranging the calls on a<br />
primitive to derived axis.’’ With the New<br />
Guinean species added to the sample, one<br />
could bolster the argument for increasing<br />
complexity as a derived condition. Thus, single-note,<br />
unpulsed calls could be considered<br />
primitive compared to multinote unpulsed<br />
calls, and pulsed multinote calls would be the<br />
most derived.<br />
Although the arrangement <strong>of</strong> calls I present<br />
above is useful for descriptive purposes,<br />
it would be naive to apply it uncritically in<br />
assessing relationships. Slightly more than<br />
half <strong>of</strong> the species (10 <strong>of</strong> 18) have unpulsed<br />
calls, and these (excepting two single-note<br />
species) differ mainly in note repetition rate<br />
and dominant frequency, with the latter being<br />
probably largely a reflection <strong>of</strong> body size.<br />
Given extant knowledge, I see no way <strong>of</strong> refuting<br />
the argument that unpulsed calls are<br />
essentially primitive and, in that respect, not<br />
phylogenetically informative. With more information<br />
available it might be possible to<br />
establish a primitive-derived sequence within<br />
the unpulsed calls in the third category. The<br />
examination <strong>of</strong> species pairs makes me<br />
doubtful, however. One <strong>of</strong> the two singlenote<br />
species, L. rhododactyla, is morphologically<br />
identical to a multinote species, L. similis.<br />
How <strong>of</strong>ten might the change from single<br />
to multinotes (or the reverse) have evolved<br />
independently in different evolutionary<br />
lines?<br />
The pulsed calls <strong>of</strong> the morphologically<br />
similar species L. dentata (category 2) and