Faculty Publications and Presentations

Publication Date

2025

Document Type

Presentation

Abstract

Members of the lungless salamander family (Caudata: Plethodontidae), currently composed of over 500 species in 29 genera, nine tribes, and two subfamilies (1), have been grouped together for almost 200 years. This consistent taxonomic history suggests they form a distinct cognitum and quite possibly an apobaramin. Despite their abundance and diversity, no formal baraminological analyses have been conducted for this family (see Wood (2)). Hennigan (3), however, tentatively defaulted to the genus level for lungless salamander kinds and suggested future research would probably lump them into larger taxonomic groupings. We utilized taxonomic, hybridization, morphological, and molecular data to estimate the number and identity of lungless salamander kinds. A survey of published literature (4-6) suggests that most lungless salamanders share a considerable number of characteristics, several of which are unique to the family. This combination of shared and unique characteristics suggests the family may represent a holobaramin. An investigation of consistent taxonomic groupings over the past 60 years (7-9) identifies seven monobaramins ranging from supergenus to tribe or subfamily level. Records of interspecific hybridization from eight of the 29 recognized genera (10), combined with genetic distance data, reveal eight monobaramins at the genus level ranging in size from 2-23 species. Three monobaramins are evident in DCA, MDS, PAM, and FANNY analyses (11-12) of 30 tongue morphology characters across eight lungless salamander feeding modes/groupings (13): 1) Tribes Plethodontini + Aneidini + Ensatinini + Desmognathini (Subfamily Plethodontinae minus Hydromantini); 2) Tribes Spelerpini + Hemidactyliini; 3) Tribes Bolitoglossini + Hydromantini + Batrachosepini. The [Bolitoglossini + Hydromantini + Batrachosepini] monobaramin is also discontinuous with the [Plethodontini + Aneidini + Ensatinini + Desmognathini] monobaramin in several DCA analyses, indicating these may be separate holobaramins. Analyses of DNA sequences, from two mitochondrial (CYTB, ND4) and one nuclear gene (RAG- 1), suggest the presence of five lungless salamander monobaramins that further cluster into two subfamily groupings: 1) Tribe Hemidactyliini; 2) Tribe Spelerpini; 3) Tribe Batrachosepini; 4) Tribe Bolitoglossini; and 5) all five tribes in Subfamily Plethodontinae. Molecular analyses, however, also indicate that these monobaramins cluster into one large family group, separate from all outgroups, and may represent a holobaramin. These DNA sequences, from 50 lungless salamander and outgroup taxa, were gathered from GenBank (www.ncbi.nlm. nih.gov/genbank) and aligned using ClustalW in MEGA (www.megasoftware.net). Corrected distance matrices for each of these genes, plus a concatenated sequence of all genes combined, were created with the TN93 + Gamma model in R (www.r-project.org) and analyzed using hierarchical clustering, MDS, and DCA in R (14-15) and BARCLAY (11-12). Future research may include additional morphological and molecular analyses as well as investigations of fossils, biogeography, and biblical passages related to potential Flood/ post-Flood dispersal mechanisms.

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