Systematics of Limnonectes (Taylorana) Dubois

The speciose genus Limnonectes exhibits a broad range of reproductive behavior and sizes at maturity. Two Southeast Asian species are near the low end of the size range and near one extreme of reproductive habits (their larvae are said to have direct development). Limnonectes hascheanus and L. limborgi are small, having a maximum snout-vent length of less than 40 mm, with reduced webbing and females with enlarged, pigment-less ova. The distinctions between these species have not been clear and L. limborgi has been treated as a junior synonym of L. hascheanus. We show that these two nominal species differ in size, development of odontoids in adult males, in extent of webbing, and mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequence data. Their geographic ranges scarcely overlap, with L. hascheanus apparently being restricted to the southern part of the Malay Peninsula and L. limborgi being distributed in a large arc from southern Myanmar northward to northern Thailand and Laos before curving around to central Laos, northeastern Thailand, Cambodia, and southern Vietnam. Because the holotype of L. limborgi appears to have been lost, we describe a neotype, using a specimen from southern Myanmar studied by Boulenger.