Denise de Cerqueira Rossa-Feres

São Paulo State University | Unesp · Campus S. J. do Rio Preto, Dept. Zoologia e Botânica

Knowledge of tadpole morphology and natural history is essential to understand and protect anuran diversity. We provide a regional taxonomic catalog of the tadpoles that occur in the Iron Quadrangle (IQ, Quadrilátero Ferrífero), a hotspot of amphibian diversity and highly threatened region in southeastern Brazil. Using a standardized methodology, f...

Predators influence microhabitat selection and activity level of tadpoles, but it is still unclear how such responses to predators differ among species and how water column's depth influences this predator-prey interaction. Here, we experimentally tested whether the presence of Odonata water-nymphs influenced spatial use and activity of benthic and...

One of the many taxonomic challenges found in the Dendropsophus microcephalus species group is the Dendropsophus walfordi distinction from D. nanus. Recent phylogenetic inferences have indicated the paraphyly of these species, although they were not designed to assess this issue. To contribute to the delimitation of these species, we analyzed the 1...

Herein, we describe the external larval morphology, internal oral features, and chondrocranium of Trachycephalus imitatrix and Trachycephalus dibernardoi and the advertisement call of T. imitatrix. To our knowledge, this is the first thorough description of the larval chondrocranium for the genus Trachycephalus. The tadpole of T. imitatrix is overa...

For grazing animals that share spatial and alimentary resources, the relationship between differences in oral morphology and the physical properties of substrates can help explain how and where species forage. The substrates may require different efforts from animals to access and remove food from their surfaces. Variation in oral morphology may pr...

Livro didático sobre os girinos da Mata Atlântica

The genus Pseudopaludicola includes small-sized anurans, widely distributed throughout South America. Twenty-three out of the 25 species occur in Brazil. Although described more than a century ago, from mid-southern Mato Grosso state, central Brazil, Pseudopaludicola ameghini is poorly known. Here we describe the characteristics of reproductive sit...

A better understanding of species coexistence and community dynamics may benefit from more insights on trait variability at the individual and species levels. Tadpole assemblages offer an excellent system to understand the relative influence of intraspecific and interspecific variability on community assembly, due to their high phenotypic plasticit...

Livro didático sobre girinos de anfíbios anuros

In nature, tadpoles encounter food on substrates oriented at different angles (e.g. vertically along stems, horizontally on the bottom). We manipulated the orientation of food-covered surfaces to test how different orientations of surfaces affect tadpoles’ feeding efficiency. We studied taxa that differed in the oral morphology of their larvae and...

The Cerrado is one of the most threatened biomes in Brazil, with little spatial representation within the Protected Area network. Recently, proposed conservation plans worldwide have advocated for the use of multiple biodiversity facets to protect unique evolutionary and functional processes. Our aim was to identify areas with high biodiversity rep...

Vocalization is one of the major means of communication in animal groups and is crucial in anuran mate recognition. Animal calls consist of spectral and temporal parameters, whose evolution can be influenced by environmental and evolutionary constraints. At the same time, acoustic niche partitioning plays a key role in determining species co-occurr...

Of the currently known 75 species within the four recognized species groups of Leptodactylus, the L. fuscus group contains 30 species, of which tadpoles are known for 24, including L. plaumanni described based on a population from Argentina. Herein, we describe external and internal oral morphology of L. plaumanni tadpoles collected in Brazil and c...

Motivation: The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community-led open-source database of biodiversity time se...

Beginning in November 2018, Brazilian legislation regulating access to genetic heritage and associated traditional knowledge will cause a bureaucratic collapse of Biodiversity research in Brazil. Law number 13.123/2015 and Decree 8772/2016 impose severe barriers to basic and applied research, and to international cooperation by introducing mandator...

Motivation: The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community-led open-source database of biodiversity time se...

Events of mass malformations in amphibian populations that have exceeded historical records have been reported over the past thirty years. Many of these events have been linked to human activities that occurred near amphibian breeding habitats. The rise in biofuels has promoted, and continues to promote, the growth of sugarcane plantations in Brazi...

Motivation: The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community led open-source database of biodiversity time se...

Microhabitat use by tadpoles has been little documented, especially for neotropical anuran species. Here we describe microhabitat use by tadpoles in two different aquatic systems, lentic and lotic, in the Atlantic Rainforest. We sampled tadpoles in 98 sites within lentic habitats, and 187 sites within lotic habitats. We categorized each of the site...

We evaluated the use of oral deformities as reliable proxies for determining Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) infection in tadpoles of six anuran species of the Atlantic Forest in southeastern Brazil. We examined oral discs of 2156 tadpoles of six species of anurans collected in 2016: Aplastodiscus albosignatus, Boana albopunctata, Boana faber,...

Anurans inhabiting lentic and lotic water bodies show distinct responses to environmental and spatial variables due to dispersal by adults and microhabitat selection by tadpoles, which creates a hierarchical structure in these metacommunities. Aiming to understand the influence of tadpole microhabitat selection and adult dispersal on species richne...

The analysis of species richness and community composition provides basic information to understand the structure of species assemblages. Here, we compared species richness and composition, compositional similarity and species turnover of tadpole communities in 14 lentic and eight lotic habitats in the Atlantic Rainforest of southeastern Brazil. Be...

We describe the larval external morphology and internal oral features of Proceratophrys mantiqueira from its type locality and provide novel natural history information for adults. The tadpoles of P. mantiqueira (Stage 37) exhibit a depressed body with low tail fins, eyes positioned dorsally, and a ventral oral disc bordered by a single row of marg...

We partitioned the total beta diversity in the species composition of anuran tadpoles to evaluate if species replacement and nestedness components are congruent at different spatial resolutions in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. We alternated the sampling grain and extent of the study area (among ponds at a site, among ponds within regions, among si...

The vegetation cover in the Atlantic Forest has been converted to human use or degraded by human activities, which declined the vegetation to 16% of its original extent. Although several protected areas have been created in this Neotropical biome over the past decades, our knowledge of the amphibian species within these areas is still far from adeq...

Because of their strong dependence on the environment, the spatial distribution of pond-breeding amphibians can be greatly influenced by anthropogenic habitat alteration. In some agricultural landscapes in Brazil, the anuran Pseudopaludicola mystacalis appears to be highly influenced by land use. Because adult males and tadpoles of this species are...

Human activities often cause habitat fragmentation and how forest fragments affect species range distributions has implications for ecology and conservation. However, few studies have considered communities within the same landscape. Here, we analyzed metacommunity structure to determine the range distributions for species in four taxonomic groups...

Herein we provide novel data on the external morphological features and natural history of the tadpoles of Scinax canastrensis and Scinax carnevallii, two poorly known tree frog species occurring in southeastern Brazil. Both species share characteristics with all other species of the Scinax catharinae group, including oral discs not emarginated wit...

One of the most important goals of biodiversity studies is to identify which characteristics of local habitats act as filters that determine the diversity of functional traits along environmental gradients. In this study, we investigated the relationship between the environmental variables of ponds and the functional trait diversity distribution of...

Temperature impacts ectotherm performance by influencing many biochemical and physiological processes. When well adapted to their environment, ectotherms should perform most efficiently at the temperatures they most commonly encounter. In the present study, we tested how differences in temperature affects the feeding kinematics of tadpoles of two a...

The Neotropical region harbors the richest fauna of anuran species in the world, and Brazil is the richest country. Taxonomical and biological studies focusing on tadpoles in Brazil began around the 1920s, but in Central Amazonia these studies only started at the end of the 1980s. Despite this, the larval stage of anurans is still poorly studied. C...

Amphibian conservation depends on knowledge about species composition and distribution. This emphasizes the need for inventories, especially in poorly sampled areas. This is the case of Southern grasslands (Campos Sulinos) associated with Araucaria forest in the state of Paraná, southern Brazil. We sampled amphibians in 105 environments from 2004 t...

A new species of Pseudopaludicola is described from human-altered areas originally covered by Semideciduous Forest in northwestern state of São Paulo, southeastern Brazil. Morphologically, the new species differs from four species belonging to the P. pusilla group by the absence of either T-shaped terminal phalanges or toe tips expanded, and from a...

Spatial and environmental processes influence species composition at distinct scales. Previous studies suggested that the distribution of larval anurans at the landscape-scale is influenced by environmental gradients related to adult breeding site selection, such as pond canopy cover, but not by water chemistry. However, the combined effects of spa...

Here, we review the species of anuran amphibian from the Serra da Bocaina National Park and its buffer area, in the Atlantic Forest of southeastern Brazil, comparing the data from a recent survey with museum records. We surveyed adult and larval anurans in ponds, marshes, and streams discontinuously from May 2008 to January 2011. In total, 63 anura...

Here, we present a molecular phylogenetic analysis of the Neotropical genus Pseudopaludicola focusing on species relationships including 11 of the 17 known species of Pseudopaludicola; several samples of Pseudopaludicola are not assigned to any species; and 34 terminal species as an outgroup. The study was based on the analysis of approximately 2.3...

Spatial and environmental processes influence species composition at distinct scales. Previous studies suggested that the landscape-scale distribution of larval anurans is influenced by environmental gradients related to adult breeding site selection, such as pond canopy cover, but not water chemistry. However, the combined effects of spatial, pond...

Leptodactylus labyrinthicus tadpoles are known predators of anuran eggs and hatchlings, but they are also able to filter-feed in the water column and scrape food off of firm substrates. We evaluated and compared these alternative feeding behaviors in relation to feeding kinematics and the shape of the mouth with high-speed digital imaging. We teste...

One of the most important questions in ecology is the relative importance of local conditions (niche processes) and dispersal ability (neutral processes) in driving metacommunity structure. Although many studies have been conducted in recent years, there is still much debate. We evaluated the processes (niche and neutral) responsible for variation...

In agricultural landscapes, studies that identify factors driving species richness and occupancy are important because they can guide farmers to use conservation practices that minimize species loss. In this context, anurans are threatened by habitat loss because they depend on the characteristics of both local water bodies and adjacent landscapes....

Background / Purpose: Our goal was to test if tadpole co-occurrence pattern in ponds is related to environmental variables, considering the phylogenetic relationships among species. We predict that differences in pond characteristics affect the co-occurrence pattern of tadpoles and that closely related species will co-occur more than expected by...

Dendropsophus is a monophyletic anuran genus with a diploid number of 30 chromosomes as an important synapomorphy. However, the internal phylogenetic relationships of this genus are poorly understood. Interestingly, an intriguing interspecific variation in the telocentric chromosome number has been useful in species identification. To address certa...

We provide novel data on the biology of Proceratophrys melanopogon and describe its larval external morphology and internal oral features on the basis of specimens from the Serra do Mar, southeastern Brazil. We also review the larval internal oral features of the genus, including descriptions and comparisons with P. cururu and P. moratoi. The exter...

Predation is a primary driver of tadpole assemblages, and the activity rate is a good predictor of the tadpoles’ tolerance for predation risk. The conflicting demands between activity and exposure to predation can generate suboptimal behaviours. Because morphological components, such as body colouration, may affect the activity of tadpoles, we pred...

Anuran larvae, which are otherwise simple in shape, typically have complex keratinized mouthparts (i.e., labial teeth and jaw sheaths) that allow them to graze upon surfaces. The diversity in these structures among species presumably reflects specializations that allow for maximal feeding efficiency on different types of food. However, we lack a ge...

Amphibians are an imperiled group of vertebrate animals that typically have biphasic life histories involving a shift from aquatic larval habitats to terrestrial adult habitats. Habitat loss is the greatest threat to amphibians and the importance of the spatial configuration of terrestrial and breeding habitats upon the landscape in determining amp...

Physalaemus barrioi is a poorly known frog endemic to the highlands of Serra da Bocaina in the Atlantic Forest of southeastern Brazil. Herein, we redescribe the species based on the type series and new specimens collected at the type locality. We also present additional data on its vocalization, karyotype, and tadpole, including the external morpho...

Aim The diversity of reproductive modes among amphibians constitutes a striking example of how differences in the biology of species provide important explanations for species distribution patterns on a broad scale. We hypothesize that sites with a higher humidity level will support more modes of reproduction than drier sites and will consequently...

Background/Question/Methods The metacommunity concepts assume that the interaction between processes in local and regional scale determine the diversity and composition of local assemblage. Although researches addressing patterns of species composition along environmental gradients have been subject of numerous studies in recent years, spatial va...

In the Neotropics, conversion of natural habitats into agricultural areas is occurring at a high rate, with consequent reduction of habitat complexity in anuran breeding ponds. Identifying features of farmland ponds that allow them to support a high diversity of species is fundamental for successful management and conservation policies and is espec...

Characteristics of the northwest region of São Paulo State and of the remnant forest fragments studied - Characteristics of the northwest region of São Paulo State (climate, relief and soil) are described. The limits of the northwest region, as defined in this study, include the whole drainage basins of Turvo-Grande and São José dos Dourados, and p...

Landscape metrics as species richness indicators for several animal and plant groups in remnant forest fragments of the northwest region of São Paulo State - The use of landscape metrics as species richness indicators has become more frequent in ecological studies during the last decades, particularly for prioritizing areas for biodiversity conserv...