Hello fellow frog forumeers!
Flybyferns recently showed
this interesting article about hybridization between
A. moreletii and
A. annae. It's overall a nice read and I suggest anyone interesting in more than just keeping the frogs to give it a go. However, I stumbled upon something I was totally unaware of, and that I would like to get some clarification on. As far as I knew, the
Agalychnis genus currently contained 6 species:
A. salator A. spurelli A. litodryas A. annae A. moreletii A. agalychnis
However, this is from the beginning of the article (which was published on the 11th of February 2011):
And so the confusion begins. That is 14 species, and it's missing
A. litodryas. Moreover, I see some species that confuses me greatly, for example
A. lemur. I know there's a species called
Hylomantis lemur, but not
Aagalychnis lemur. So I turned to good ol' Wikipedia, which states the following:
Lets face it, Wikipedia is not wrong that often, but it seems to be something wrong here, since Wiki shares my view of the
Agalychnis genus.
While continuing the confusion, and tried finding something about the
Hylomantis lemur, so I Wiki:ed that as well, which gives
this, clearly stating that it's a frog within
Hylomantis. A searched for
Agalychnis lemur gives nothing. I also searched for
Hylomantis and now it gets even more interesting. All the species listed within the
Hylomantis article, can all be found listen as
Agalychnis in the article about hybridization. After some more reading in the article, I found this:
According to this, there's no longer a
Hylomantis nor a
Pachymedusa genus within the world of frogs, since they all were added to
Agalychnis. Since Wikipeda seems to be clueless about this, I tried to find something else to back it up with. I then found the amazing "subwiki"
Wikispecies. When reading the article about
Agalychnis, it looks exactly like the one in the hybrid article. In addition to this,
Hylomantis and
Pachymedusa both redirects you to the
Agalychnis article. While at Wikispecies, I decided to look up
A. litodryas as well, but it redirects to
A. spurreli (where Wikipedia have two different articles, claiming they are two different species with different attributes and that they look different from each other).
So, where am I going with this? Well, I just want some confirmation from someone that knows what's up, and that can back it up with some sources, articles, research etc. I would love to know why and when this happened, and how it's possible to merge two species into one, when they look so different from each other. Where there just two different morphs, or how is the logic behind it?
I'm thankful for any answers I get regarding either the species-merge or the genus-merge. I just want to educate myself in a field that I'm very interesting in, and I want to be up to date with the research. Feels bad that I've been walking around thinking I know at least a decent amount about the
Agalychnis genus, when I clearly don't!
Lastly, thanks for reading!