The influence of environment and phylogeny on the bauplan of anuran larvae in lentic versus lotic conditions

Abstract The role of evolutionary and ecological processes with regard to the bauplan of anuran larvae remains little understood. We studied tadpoles of 144 lentic or lotic taxa in 22 families from seven zoogeographic regions. Using stacked high-resolution images, standardized examination of 30 morphological characters of preserved tadpoles (of body, tail, oral disc) were scored and compared to the impact of phylogenetic signal (multiple nuclear and mitochondrial markers) and macro-climate. Additionally, larvae were characterized as living in a lentic versus lotic environment and if nutrition specialist or not. Categorical Principal Component Analysis, distance matrices and pairwise correlation analyses were performed. Our results suggest that phylogeny has a higher impact on the morphology than habitat (i.e. lentic, lotic), while no effect of macro-climate or food specialization was found. We emphasize the value of highly standardized morphological data when investigating the influence of different factors of phenotypic variation.