Allobates Zimmermann and Zimmermann, 1988

Class: Amphibia > Order: Anura > Superfamily: Dendrobatoidea > Family: Aromobatidae > Subfamily: Allobatinae > Genus: Allobates
63 species

Allobates Zimmermann and Zimmermann, 1988, Salamandra, 24: 136. Type species: Prostherapis femoralis Boulenger, 1884, by original designation.

English Names

Nurse Frogs (Melo-Sampaio, Oliveira, and Prates, 2018, S. Am. J. Herpetol., 13: 131. 

White-lined Poison Frogs (Hedges, Powell, Henderson, Hanson, and Murphy, 2019, Caribb. Herpetol., 67: 7). 

Distribution

Pacific lowlands of Colombia and Ecuador, and north and west in Central America to Nicaragua; Guyanan region and Amazonian drainage of South America in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam, and French Guiana; Martinique.

Comment

Allobates (sensu stricto) was removed from the synonymy of Epipedobates by Clough and Summers, 2000, Biol. J. Linn. Soc., 70: 515-540, where it had been placed by Myers, Paolillo-O., and Daly, 1991, Am. Mus. Novit., 3002: 18. See comments by Köhler, 2000, Bonn. Zool. Monogr., 48: 233-236. Vences, Kosuch, Boistel, Haddad, La Marca, and Lötters, 2003, Organisms Divers. Evol., 3: 219, suggested a phylogenetic placement of Allobates (sensu stricto). Grant, Frost, Caldwell, Gagliardo, Haddad, Kok, Means, Noonan, Schargel, and Wheeler, 2006, Bull. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist., 299, redelimited the genus and provided explicit phylogenetic hypotheses that modified or rejected previous views. Lötters, Jungfer, Henkel, and Schmidt, 2007, Poison Frogs: 303, suggested that a number of cryptic species remained to be named in the Allobates femoralis group. Grant, Rada, Anganoy-Criollo, Batista, Dias, Jeckel, Machado, and Rueda-Almonacid, 2017, S. Am. J. Herpetol., 12 (Special Issue): 1–90, rdiscussed the phylogenetics of the genus and ecognized four species groups: 22-chromosome group (Allobates algorei, Allobates amissibilis, Allobates bacurau, Allobates caeruleodactylus, Allobates chalcopis, Allobates crombei, Allobates flaviventris, Allobates gasconi, Allobates granti, Allobates grillisimilis, Allobates humilis, Allobates insperatus, Allobates juanii, Allobates magnussoni, Allobates masniger, Allobates nidicola, Allobates ornatus, Allobates paleovarzensis, Allobates pittieri, Allobates subfolionidicans, Allobates sumtuosus, Allobates tapajos, Allobates trilineatus), Allobates femoralis group (Allobates femoralis, Allobates zaporo), trans-Andean group (Allobates niputidea, Allobates talamancae), and Atlantic Forest group (Allobates olfersioides), with some others (Allobates fratisenescus, Allobates hodli, Allobates kingsburyi, Allobates peruvianus, Allobates undulatus) placed phylogenetically but unassigned to species group. Melo-Sampaio, Oliveira, and Prates, 2018, S. Am. J. Herpetol., 13: 131–149, discussed the molecular phylogenetics of the species in the genus, and the distribution and phenotypic variation of western Amazonian species.  Moraes, Pavan, and Lima, 2019, Zootaxa, 4648: 401–434, provided a mtDNA tree as part of biogeographic and a species delimitation study. Réjaud, Rodrigues, Crawford, Castroviejo-Fisher, Jaramillo-Martinez, Chaparro, Glaw, Gagliardi-Urrutia, Moravec, De la Riva, Pérez-Peña, Lima, Werneck, Hrbek, Ron, Ernst, Kok, Driskell, Chave, and Fouquet, 2020, J. Biogeograph., 47: 2472–2482, reported on the molecular biogeography of Allobates in Amazonia. Moraes and Lima, 2021, Herpetologica, 77: 146–163, provided a molecular tree of the species groups and their exemplars. Portik, Streicher, and Wiens, 2023, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol., 188 (107907): 57, 67, reported the non-monophyly of Allobates (and Aromobatidae and Dendrobatidae) on the basis of the placement in their molecular tree of Allobates ranoides, Allobates cepedai, and Allobates picachos; Allobates cepedai and Allobates picachos were transferred to Hyloxalus in 2017 by Grant, Rada, Anganoy-Criollo, Batista, Dias, Jeckel, Machado, and Rueda-Almonacid, 2017, S. Am. J. Herpetol., 12 (Special Issue): 55. As for the placement of Allobates ranoides by Portik et al. (2023), in Hyloxalus, Santos, Coloma, Summers, Caldwell, Ree, and Cannatella, 2009, PLoS Biol., 7(3: e1000056): 1–14, identified their sample of this species as belonging to Hyloxalus, although this still requires verification. Páez-Vacas, Coloma, and Santos, 2010, Zootaxa, 2711: 69, referred to this TNHC specimen as Hyloxalus sp.

Contained taxa (63 sp.):

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