A New Species of Terrestrial-Breeding Frog, Genus Pristimantis (Anura: Strabomantidae), from the Peruvian Yungas of Central Peru^†

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

The manuscript titled “A new species of terrestrial-breeding frog, genus Pristimantis Anura: Strabomantidae), from the Peruvian Yungas of central Peru” is in a good presentation and contains a very relevant study. The authors have done a big improvement in the new version. All the finds here provide important data for the understanding of herpetofauna, specifically, to the Pristimantis and Latin America diversity. So, I accept the manuscript with minor reviews described below.

-       Please, verify all the manuscript, there is a lot of species in non-italic.

Line 148

-          I think it is important to discuss something about the need of a phylogeographic analisis, because the region has a high diversity and deserve a higher study about population genetics and speciation.

Author Response

We did put in italics all the scientific names throughout the discussion.

The montane forest in central Peru harbors a high diversity of Pristimantis fauna but before phylogeographic analysis we need better surveys

Thanks for the review,

PV.

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

I must admit that I read with great interest the article submitted to Taxonomy (MDPI) entitled ' A new species of terrestrial-breeding frog, genus Pristimantis (Anura: Strabomantidae), from the Peruvian Yungas of central Peru'. Pristimantis is a very large genus of frogs distributed in the southern Caribbean islands and in Central and South America from Honduras to northern Argentina and southern Brazil. With ca. 600 described species, the genus had more species than any other genus of vertebrate animals. Many of these taxa are endemic to the Northwestern Andean montane forests ecoregion in north-western South America. Since species of this genus live in inaccessible habitat conditions, difficult for researchers to penetrate, it seems that the number of true species living in the Andes may be much higher.

The article is well-written, and I find it very interesting. In this manuscript, the Authors used an integrative taxonomy approach that combined molecular, morphological, and bioacoustics traits of the advertisement calls data to describe a new species of Pristimantis i.e. P. clarae from the Andean montane forests of central Peru. In my opinion, this is a very interesting article, well prepared. The presented evidence for the separateness of the newly described species is convincing. The presentation of the results of the article is clear and attractive. This manuscript is well-collected, designed, and organized. The methodology and conclusions are scientifically sound, so I believe that the results of the submitted article are very important and should be published. I don’t have a major comment, but suggestions are below.

Some minor notes: In the Discussion chapter, please correct the Latin names of taxa, all names should be in italics.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

We did put in italics all the scientific names throughout the discussion.

Thank you very much for the review,

PV.

Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

The study "A new species of terrestrial-breeding frog, genus Pristimantis
(Anura: Strabomantidae), from the Peruvian Yungas of central Peru" describes a new species of strabomantid frogs. The research was well thought out, supported by collection permits and the authors provide a set of morphological, bioacoustic and molecular data to support the description of a new species level taxon. I detected some small formatting issues which should be addressed, and I provided some comments in the annotated .pdf. The authors should more carefully proofread the manuscript prior to resubmission. Other than that, this is a solid contribution to the field and I recommend the paper to be published in Taxonomy after a minor revision. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you very much for your time. We worked in each of your comments and suggestions. We are agreeing with all your suggestions, except with the last related to the include the permits in the acknowledgments because the permit is included in the methodology.

Thank you again,

PV.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript titled “A new species of terrestrial-breeding frog, genus Pristimantis Anura: Strabomantidae), from the Peruvian Yungas of central Peru” is in a good presentation and contains a very relevant study. All the finds here provide important data for the understanding of herpetofauna, specifically, to the Pristimantis and Latin America diversity. So, I accept the manuscript with minor reviews described below.

Line 154 to 190

-          I feel a lack about the phylogenetic relationship of the species here described with the species already described and related to this. A simple analysis of genetic p-distance can be able to differentiate, once the more related species in the genus are differentiated by close to 4%, witch is a high number of genetic distance for a short fragment as the final portion of 16s. A good example is mentioned on the following paper abnd include P. Albertus, for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7686219/#B8

-          Another point that must be consider here, is about the phylogenetic discussion between all the related species. The authors consider the similarity and shows the morphological similar characteristics, but it is not discussed with what there is in the bibliography. The authors consider the sympatric species but not consider the genetic flow that can be existing in the area. I understand that is not the scope of the manuscript. Nevertheless, even if there is no chance, or some limitation to discover the genetic distances between the related species, it is important to compare and discuss about it on the manuscript.

-          It is important to note, that the article I exemplified here is not the newest and is only one of the extensive bibliography that should be considered for the phylogenetic relationship discussion.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Editor and authors,

I have carefully read the manuscript and found it interesting, important for obvious conservation reasons and well written. However I am not sure why there is no molecular data in this paper. It is a norm these days to reject any molecular systematic paper describing a species without morphology and I would expect the same fate for a morphology based paper that lacks genetics.

The sympatric species of P. albertus is problematic as it has two calls and also because there is another P. sp in the same area that remains undescribed. My experience with Pristimantis is that morphology is of little use in this genus, and within species morphological disparity is huge. I have always needed to end up describing or not only based on mitochondrial data as no other group of characters alone was enough to describe species in this genus. 

The authors mention that the new species does not belong to any known group, or that it does not fall within any, but just sequencing one or two markers would tell the phylogenetic position and its relationship with P, albertus, which has sequences, and thus would make comparison so simple. Please see the paper and see how much you could get out if only a based tree was presented https://zookeys.pensoft.net/article/56277/.