Phylogeny and biogeography of Arabian populations of the Persian Horned Viper <i>Pseudocerastes persicus</i> (Duméril, Bibron & Duméril, 1854)

<p>The Persian Horned Viper (<i>Pseudocerastes persicus</i>) is distributed from northeast Iraq through the Iranian Plateau to western Pakistan with isolated populations in the Hajar Mountains of south-eastern Arabia. Like the other members of the genus <i>Pseudocerastes</i>, <i>P. persicus</i> is a sit-and-wait ambush feeder with low vagility, a characteristic that often results in high levels of population differentiation. In order to clarify the level of genetic variability, phylogenetic relationships, and biogeography of the Arabian populations of <i>P. persicus</i> we sequenced 597 base pairs of the mitochondrial cytochrome <i>b</i> of four individuals from the Hajar Mountains in south-eastern Arabia and inferred their phylogenetic relationships including 10 samples of <i>P. persicus</i> from Iran and Pakistan, four <i>P. urarachnoides</i> and one <i>P. fieldi</i> downloaded from GenBank. The four Arabian samples are genetically very similar in the gene fragment analysed and are phylogenetically very closely related to populations of <i>P. persicus</i> from coastal south Iran. Biogeographically, it appears that colonisation of the Hajar Mountains by <i>P. persicus</i> took place from Iran very recently, most probably during the last glaciation, when most of the Persian Gulf was above sea level and did not represent a barrier for dispersal.</p

Sampling site and localities.

<p>Map showing the geographic situation of the Socotra Archipelago and the sampling localities for all the 380 barcoded individuals included in this study. Maps were drawn using DIVA-GIS v.7.5 (available at <a href="http://www.diva-gis.org" target="_blank">http://www.diva-gis.org</a>; digital elevation model freely available at <a href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/" target="_blank">http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/</a>).</p

Taxonomic accuracy.

<p>Taxonomic accuracy.</p

Genetic divergences.

<p>Genetic divergences.</p

Comparison of maximum intra-specific divergence with nearest-neighbour distance for each species in the dataset.

<p>Points above the 1:1 line indicate the presence of a local barcoding gap. Note that only 27 points are displayed as four species have single sequences.</p

Descriptive statistics for all morphometric variables examined for <i>P</i>. <i>ruusaljibalicus</i> sp. nov. and <i>P</i>. <i>orlovi</i>.

<p>Mean ± Standard Deviation (SD) and range (Min–Max) are given. Abbreviations of characters as explained in the Material and Methods and as in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0180397#pone.0180397.s005" target="_blank">S3 Table</a>.</p

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Specimen identification success.

<p>Values for both distance-based (‘best match’; BM, ‘best close match’; BCM, and ‘all species barcodes’; ASB—using different distance thresholds) and tree-based (Hebert et al. 2003a; Meier et al. 2006) approaches [<a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0149985#pone.0149985.ref001" target="_blank">1</a>,<a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0149985#pone.0149985.ref034" target="_blank">34</a>].</p

Bayesian COI tree for all the reptiles of the Socotra Archipelago.

<p>Species delimitations using three distance thresholds with higher taxonomic accuracy (3%, 6% and 9%) and GMYC using three different datasets: A—including all 380 barcoded sequences in the same analysis; B—including independent analyses for Serpentes, Scincoidea, Lacertoidea and Gekkota; C—including independent analyses for the following families: Leptotyphlopidae, Scincidae, Lacertidae, Sphaerodactylidae, Phyllodactylidae, Gekkonidae; *indicates clusters that were depicted as in A because taxa are monoespecific or monogeneric. See <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0149985#sec002" target="_blank">Material and Methods</a> for further details. Black dots indicate posterior probability values ≥0.95. Bootstrap values ≥70% of the ML analysis are shown next to the nodes.</p

Cryptic diversity in <i>Ptyodactylus</i> (Reptilia: Gekkonidae) from the northern Hajar Mountains of Oman and the United Arab Emirates uncovered by an integrative taxonomic approach - Fig 4

<p><b>Visualization of the climatic space occupied by <i>Ptyodactylus orlovi</i> (1) and <i>Ptyodactylus ruusaljibalicus</i> sp. nov. (2) based on PCA-env (A) and ENFA (B).</b> (A) The niches of both species are displayed on a multi-dimensional scale represented by the first two axes of a principal component analyses (PCA) summarizing the entire study area. (B) The x-axis shows marginality and the y-axis specialization. In both figures the grey shadings reflect the density of the occurrences of each species by cell. The dashed and solid contour lines illustrate, respectively, 50% and 100% of the available background environment. The significance of the equivalency and similarity tests is shown with an asterisc (*).</p