Rohan Pethiyagoda

Rohan Pethiyagoda
Australian Museum · Ichthyology

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170
Publications
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Publications

Publications (170)
Article
Full-text available
Sri Lanka's biota is derived largely from Southeast Asian lineages which immigrated via India following its early-Eocene contact with Laurasia. The island is now separated from southeastern India by the 30 km wide Palk Strait which, during sea-level low-stands, was bridged by the 140 km-wide Palk Isthmus. Consequently, biotic ingress and egress wer...
Preprint
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Ecomorphs result from divergent natural selection, leading to species-rich adaptive radiations. Identifying ecomorphs and the resulting adaptive radiations in frogs is challenging due to conserved morphology and high species diversity. In this study, we demonstrate the ecological and climate specializations that have driven the diversification of s...
Article
Full-text available
Loaches of the genus Lepidocephalich-thys are ubiquitous in Peninsular India and the nearby continental-shelf island of Sri Lanka. Four valid species are reported from this region: L. thermalis, a species reported from across this region; L. jonk-laasi, confined to rainforests in southern Sri Lanka; L. coromandelensis, from the Eastern Ghats and L....
Preprint
Full-text available
Sri Lanka’s biota is derived largely from Southeast Asian lineages which immigrated via India following its early-Eocene contact with Laurasia. The island is now separated from southeastern India by the 30 km wide Palk Strait which, during sea-level low-stands, was bridged by the 140 km-wide Palk Isthmus. Consequently, biotic ingress and egress wer...
Article
Full-text available
Several recent authors have called for the revision of the common and scientific names associated with taxa, as well as scientific terms, that may be construed as offensive (e.g., Hammer & Thiele, 2021; Cheng et al., 2023) or inappropriate (e.g., Gillman & Wright, 2020; Guedes et al., 2023). These proposals have been met with resistance, for exampl...
Article
Full-text available
Ricefishes of the genus Oryzias occur commonly in the fresh and brackish waters in coastal lowlands ranging from India across Southeast Asia and on to Japan. Among the three species of Oryzias recorded from peninsular India, two widespread species, O. carnaticus and O. dancena, have previously been reported from Sri Lanka based on museum specimens...
Preprint
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Climate change and infectious diseases continue to drive global amphibian population declines, contributing to one of the greatest vertebrate extinctions of the Anthropocene. Currently around 16% amphibian species across the world are affected by four pathogens – Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis ( Bd ), B. salamandrivorans ( Bsal ), Ranavirus and Per...
Article
Full-text available
Large diversifications of species are known to occur unevenly across space and evolutionary lineages, but the relative importance of their driving mechanisms, such as climate, ecological opportunity and key evolutionary innovations (KEI), remains poorly understood. Here, we explore the remarkable diversification of rhacophorid frogs, which represen...
Article
Full-text available
Background Sri Lanka is a continental island separated from India by the Palk Strait, a shallow-shelf sea, which was emergent during periods of lowered sea level. Its biodiversity is concentrated in its perhumid south-western ‘wet zone’. The island’s freshwater fishes are dominated by the Cyprinidae, characterized by small diversifications of speci...
Book
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Despite advances in biodiversity exploration, the origins of Sri Lanka's fauna and flora have never yet been treated in a synthetic work. This book draws together the threads that make up that fascinating 100-million year story. Encompassing the island's entire biota while emphasising the ecology, biogeography and phylogeography of freshwater fishe...
Article
Full-text available
Sri Lanka is an amphibian hotspot of global significance. Its anuran fauna is dominated by the shrub frogs of the genus Pseudophilautus. Except for one small clade of four species in Peninsular India, these cool-wet adapted frogs, numbering some 59 extant species, are distributed mainly across the montane and lowland rain forests of the island. Wit...
Article
The cyprinid genus Dawkinsia comprises 13 species distributed in lowland streams and rivers in southern peninsular India and Sri Lanka. Eleven species are endemic to India, largely restricted to streams draining the Western Ghats, while one is confined to the Knuckles Hills of Sri Lanka. One species, D. filamentosa, has a wide range, straddling the...
Preprint
Full-text available
24 Although large diversifications of species occur unevenly across space and evolutionary 25 lineages, the relative importance of their driving mechanisms, such as climate, ecological 26 opportunity and key innovations, remains poorly understood. Here, we explore the 27 remarkable diversification of rhacophorid frogs, which represent six percent o...
Article
Despite exhibiting multiple morphological adaptations to living in swiftly flowing water (rheophily), Garra ceylonensis is one of the most widely distributed freshwater fish in Sri Lanka. It is thus an ideal organism to reconstruct the evolutionary history of a widespread, yet morphologically specialized, freshwater fish in a tropical-island settin...
Article
Despite exhibiting multiple morphological adaptations to living in swiftly flowing water (rheophily), Garra ceylonensis is one of the most widely distributed freshwater fish in Sri Lanka. It is thus an ideal organism to reconstruct the evolutionary history of a widespread, yet morphologically specialized, freshwater fish in a tropical-island settin...
Article
The South and SouthEast Asian freshwater fish genus Systomus (Cyprinidae) comprises 17 valid species. Six nominal species, including three endemics, have been reported from Sri Lanka, a continental island separated from India by a shallow-shelf sea. The species diversity of Systomus on the island has until now not been assessed; neither has an eval...
Article
The diversity of the freshwater-fish genus Rasbora (Cyprinidae) on Sri Lanka (five species) is high compared with the four species reported from the peninsula of India, from which the island's cyprinid fauna is derived. The paucity of characters by which species of Rasbora can be phenotypically distinguished renders field identification difficult,...
Article
As the type species of the genus Channa, the identity of the pelvic-finless snakehead Channa orientalis Bloch is important to channid systematics. Although this name has been attached to a Sri Lankan species for the past 160 years, its vaguely specified type locality, ‘India Orientali’, has long cast doubt as to its origin. Here, based on a collect...
Article
The freshwater-fish genus Laubuka contains ∼13 species distributed through the lowlands of tropical South and South-east Asia. Four of these species (Laubuka lankensis, L. varuna, L. ruhuna, and L. insularis) are reported as endemic to Sri Lanka, a remarkable datum given the island’s small size. We sampled populations of Laubuka at 56 locations in...
Article
Full-text available
The dwarf snakehead Channa gachua (Hamilton, 1822) (type locality Bengal) has been reported from a vast range, from Iran to Taiwan, and northern India to Sri Lanka. Here, adopting an integrative taxonomic approach, we show that the Sri Lankan snakehead previously referred to as C. gachua is in fact a distinct species, for which the name C. kelaarti...
Article
Molecular and morphological analyses show that Esomus thermoicos is the only species of Esomus in Sri Lanka. Esomus thermoicos is distinguished from its congeners by the combination of having a complete lateral line, a dark mediolateral stripe, a short pectoral fin that does not reach the anal-fin origin when adpressed, and by lacking conspicuous s...
Article
Full-text available
Morphological and molecular analyses of specimens representative of the geographic range of the cyprinid genus Amblypharyngodon in Sri Lanka suggest the presence of only a single species in the island, for which the name Amblypharyngodongrandisquamis Jordan & Starks, 1917, is available. Amblypharyngodongrandisquamis is a species endemic to Sri Lank...
Article
We address several problems arising from 'A review of the genus Devario in Sri Lanka (Teleostei: Cyprinidae), with description of two new species', a paper authored by S. Batuwita, M. de Silva and S. Udugampola and published in 2017 in the journal FishTaxa (2(3): 156-179). The neotypes they designate for Perilampus malabaricus Jerdon and Perilampus...
Article
Full-text available
A recent (2013) taxonomic review of the freshwater-fish genus Rasboroides, which is endemic to Sri Lanka, showed it to comprise four species: R. vaterifloris, R. nigro- marginatus, R. pallidus and R. rohani. Here, using an integrative-taxonomic analysis of morphometry, meristics and mitochondrial DNA sequences of cytochrome b (cytb) and cytochrome...
Article
Full-text available
Discovering and monitoring anuran populations that are in decline, and ascertaining boundaries for cryptic and rare species, is a challenge for their conservation management. Here, we integrate three techniques, bioacoustics (call), niche modeling and DNA barcoding as a test case to investigate how the combination of these methods can enhance searc...
Article
Pseudophilautus comprises an endemic diversification predominantly associated with the wet tropical regions of Sri Lanka that provides an opportunity to examine the effects of geography and historical climate change on diversification. Using a time-calibrated multi-gene phylogeny, we analyze the tempo of diversification in the context of past clima...
Article
Full-text available
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) commits its 196 nation parties to conserve biological diversity, use its components sustainably, and share fairly and equitably the benefits from the utilization of genetic resources. The last of these objectives was further codified in the Convention's Nagoya Protocol (NP), which came into effect in 201...
Article
Full-text available
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) commits nation parties to conserve biodiversity, use its components sustainably, and share the benefits equitably and fairly. The last of these aims was further elaborated in the Nagoya Protocol (NP). The CBD and NP have overlooked the fact that biological resources are truly renewable and that there exi...
Article
Full-text available
Studies of the patterns and processes of biogeography necessarily contingent on a robust taxonomic foundation which, in turn, depends on a thorough exploration of the biota of the concerned regions. The formal exploration of the flora and fauna of Sri Lanka commenced in the second half of the 17th century, during the Dutch colonial period. The earl...
Article
Full-text available
Snakehead fishes of the family Channidae are predatory freshwater teleosts from Africa and Asia comprising 38 valid species. Snakeheads are important food fishes (aquaculture, live food trade) and have been introduced widely with several species becoming highly invasive. A channid barcode library was recently assembled by Serrao and co-workers to b...
Data
50% Majority rule consensus tree of the neighbour joining tree based on HKY distances. Bootstrap values from 1000 pseudoreplicates are shown. (EPS)
Data
Snakehead chronogram from the BEAST analysis using a coalescence prior. Species delimitations based on BIN, GMYC single, GMYC multiple, and PTP thresholds are indicated by black bars. Misidentified and incomplete identified specimens are indicated with a red dot. (EPS)
Data
Neigbour joining tree of Parachanna including additional sequences. The lineage corresponding to the new species Pa. sp. DRCongo is highlighted in light red. (PDF)
Data
Neigbour joining tree based on HKY distance. Misidentified and incomplete identified specimens are indicated with a red dot. (EPS)
Data
Maximum likelihood tree of the 423 taxa data set that only included unique haplotypes. Bootstrap values from 1000 pseudoreplicates are shown. (PDF)
Data
Table of specimens, GenBank accession numbers, BOLD identification, BIN assignment and locality information. (XLSX)
Data
Result of the bGMYC analysis showing sequence-by-sequence distribution of posterior probabilities. The coloured table is a matrix with the probabilities of sequences to be conspecific, ranking from yellow to red: the highest to the lowest values. The timetree corresponds to the consensus tree from BEAST analysis. (EPS)
Article
Full-text available
The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...
Data
Full-text available
Figure S1: Database schema. Diversity data in yellow, GIS data in green and Catalogue of Life data in blue. The diversity tables datasource, study, site, measuredtaxon and diversitymeasurement follow the structure described in ‘Methods’ in the main text and in Hudson et al. (2014): a datasource is associated with one or more study records, each of...
Data
The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...
Article
Full-text available
The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...
Article
Mystus nanus, new species, is described from lowland streams, rivers and reservoirs throughout Sri Lanka. Previously misidentified in Sri Lanka as M. vittatus, the new species is distinguished from its Indian and Sri Lankan congeners by having two cream stripes along the flanks, a black hypural blotch, the distal margin of the dorsal fin rounded, e...
Article
Full-text available
Patterns of reproductive-mode evolution in Old World tree frogs (Anura, Rhacophoridae). —Zoologica Scripta, 00, 000–000. The Old World tree frogs (Anura: Rhacophoridae), with 387 species, display a remarkable diversity of reproductive modes – aquatic breeding, terrestrial gel nesting, terrestrial foam nesting and terrestrial direct development. The...
Article
Full-text available
The bufonid genus Adenomus, an endemic of the montane and lowland rainforests of central and south-western Sri Lanka, has been considered to comprise of three species, viz. A. kelaartii, A. dasi and A. kandianus, the last of which has been recently highlighted as " the world's rarest toad " . We conducted a survey across the known range of Adenomus...
Article
The South Asian Cichlidae are composed of two clades that together represent the sister group of the Madagascan genus Paretroplus Bleeker. Chaetodon suratensis Bloch and Etroplus canarensis Day are retained in Etroplus Cuvier, while Chaetodon maculatus Bloch is allocated to Pseudetroplus Bleeker. Pseudetroplus is distinguished from Etroplus in havi...
Data
Full-text available
Since the offi cial implementation of zoological nomenclature by Carl von Linné in 1758 there has been a steady increase in the number of recognized extant amphibian species. However, rates of species descriptions over time have been neither constant nor decreasing – as one would expect when assuming that the number of undiscovered species decrease...
Data
Full-text available
The discovery of large numbers of new amphibian species in Sri Lanka and elsewhere (Pethiyagoda and Manamendra-Arachchi 1998; Köhler et al. 2005; and see Essay 1.1), even as population declines accelerate worldwide, presents profound challenges to conservation managers. Prioritizing conserva-tion actions in the face of declines caused by a diversit...
Data
Full-text available
45 At a time when amphibian populations globally are in decline, the recent discoveries of large numbers of new frog species on Sri Lanka, an island from which the pathogenic chytrid fungus has not yet been reported, may seem heartening (Meegaskumbura et al. 2002). A total of 42 new species of anurans have been described since 1993, and many more s...
Article
Full-text available
The vast majority of the world's anurans feed terrestrially, with aquatic prey capture having been observed in only a handful of species. We tested the predation behaviour of the strictly aquatic 'fanged' frog Lankanectes corrugatus (Nyctibatrachidae) by providing specimens with both aquatic and terrestrial feeding opportunities. The frogs successf...
Article
Mystus zeylanicus, new species, is described from lowland rivers and reservoirs of Sri Lanka. It differs from most South Asian congeners in having a long-based adipose fin, and differs from those having a similar-shaped adipose fin by mensural characters of the eye, head, dorsal-fin spine, body depth and caudal-peduncle depth, as well as its unifor...
Chapter
This chapter reviews the current state of taxonomic knowledge of Lates in the countries bordering the Indian and (western) Pacific Oceans, provides aids to the identification of the known species, and remarks on conservation issues that relate to taxonomic knowledge.
Chapter
With dozens of species already declared extinct and hundreds more threatened with imminent extinction, Sri Lanka's biodiversity is in trouble. The country has hitherto relied on a failed paradigm: that government is the sole custodian and protector of biodiversity. It asserts that protective legislation and effective enforcement alone will save thr...
Article
Pethiyagoda et al. (2012) made available the genus-group name Dravidia (type species Cirrhinus fasciatus Jerdon, 1849: 305) for the ‘Puntius fasciatus’ group of fishes endemic to the peninsula of India. We were unaware at the time this paper was written (2010) that this name had shortly before been preoccupied by Dravidia Lehrer, 2010, in Diptera:...
Article
With Sri Lanka's old-growth forests having been reduced to less than 20% of their pre-colonial extent, increasing areas of land, formerly heavily influenced by humans, are being allowed to return to secondary forests. These range from land recovering from swidden cultivation in the dry zone, through abandoned tea plantations in the lower-montane zo...
Article
Full-text available
The tropical Asian cyprinid genus Puntius, which contains some 120 valid species, has long been suspected to be polyphyletic. Here, through an examination of external morphology, osteology, and analysis of 16S ribosomal RNA and cytochrome b gene fragments from 31 South Asian species hitherto referred to Puntius, we show that these fishes represent...
Article
Full-text available
Two new species of Lates Cuvier are described. Lates lakdiva, new species, from western Sri Lanka, differs from its Indo-Pacific congeners by its lesser body depth, 26.6‒27.6% SL; 5 rows of scales in transverse line between base of third dorsalfin spine and lateral line; 31‒34 serrae on the posterior edge of the preoperculum; third anal-fin spine l...
Article
Full-text available
Hemidactylus pieresii Kelaart, a species first described from Kandy, Sri Lanka, in 1852 but not recorded since, is redescribed from two recently-discovered populations, one at the type locality and another in the rainforests of the island's south-western lowlands. It is shown to be similar to H. depressus (in the synonymy of which it has been since...
Article
An understanding of floral succession is vital in planning the restoration of native vegetation in abandoned agricultural landscapes. Although such restoration is essential for the establishment of habitat corridors between the fragments of tropical montane cloud forest in the Sri Lankan highlands, in which > 90% of the land has been converted to t...
Article
Recent surveys conducted in Sri Lanka show that five species of Rasbora are present in the island. The name R. dandia Valenciennes is revived for the Sri Lankan and southern Indian species previously assigned to R. daniconius. Rasbora dandia differs from topotypical R. daniconius, among other characters, by having a complete (vs. incomplete) latera...
Article
Full-text available
Phylogenetic relationships among foam-nesting clades of Old World tree frogs are analyzed using both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA data, with particular focus on Sri Lankan members of the genus Polypedates. A distinctive, highly supported endemic Sri Lankan clade is identified, and recognized as a new genus, Taruga. This clade, which had previously...
Article
As part of a Global Biodiversity Hotspot, the conservation of Sri Lanka's endemic biodiversity warrants special attention. With 51 species (50 of them endemic) occurring in the island, the biodiversity of freshwater crabs is unusually high for such a small area (65,600 km(2)). Freshwater crabs have successfully colonized most moist habitats and all...
Article
The hump-nosed pit vipers of the genus Hypnale are of substantial medical importance in Sri Lanka and India, being included among the five snakes most frequently associated with life-threatening envenoming in humans. The genus has hitherto been considered to comprise three species: H. hypnale, common to Sri Lanka and the Western Ghats of peninsular...