RESEARCH
RESEARCH
As a systematist I appreciate several sources of information, always focusing in evolution and taxonomy. A phylogenetic hypothesis, whether reconstructed with DNA or morphological data, makes possible to study and understand the evolution of distinct characters, such as species’ skeleton, vocalizations, proteins, or chromosomes. Having this in mind, today my research follows basically three lines that I present below. Although they are not necessarily independent from each other. Click here to download my CV.
1. Evolution of character systems in Anura
My current research aims to understand the convergence of the prepollical spine in distinct groups of anurans. Other interesting questions being surveyed are related to the evolution of secondary sexual characters associated to the prepollex. The prepollical spine in several groups varies in size and structure between sexes, being normally entirely osseous and larger in males than in females, because it is used in territorial combats. These questions make the study of natural history of these distinct groups imperative for the understanding of the spine-shaped prepollex evolution. While my primary focus is on the prepollex, I am also interested in the evolution of other character systems, like behavior and natural history, larval traits, bioacoustics, among others. |
A cleared and double stained hand of a male Boana showing its prepollical spine.
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2. Systematics and taxonomy of Anura
My formation is fundamentally on systematics. In both my masters and PhD I worked with phylogenetics and systematic biology. All the projects I developed in this field so far are related to the family Hylidae. I’ve been collaborating on papers about phylogenetic analyses and taxonomy of various groups of the family, such as Boana, Bokermannohyla, and Myersiohyla. Robust phylogenetic hypotheses are important because they open the possibilities to study the evolution of various characteristics and to solve several taxonomic questions. |
Undergrad students
Júlia Pinna started studying the sexual dimorphism in muscles associated to the prepollex. Sexual dimorphism was evidenced in muscles related to amplexus, but has never been studied under the context of prepollex usage. In this study she is conducting at USP, she will provide a comparative analysis of fiber type composition in male and female individuals of Cophomantini species with a spine-shaped or a sickle-shaped prepollex.
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Completed undergraduate training
In his Bachelor Thesis, at Universidade de São Paulo in 2021, Daniel Nakamura studied the evolution of advertisement calls in Cophomantini (Anura: Hylidae). Specifically, he looked for answering how body size, habitat, and sexual size dimorphism affect the frequency of the vocalizations across the Cophomantini phylogeny. For this, he is developed skills with phylogenetic comparative methods under parsimony and maximum likelihood approaches. His manuscript is published at the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society.
In her Bachelor Thesis, at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in 2017, Julia Soares Parreiras studied the skeleton of Myersiohyla neblinaria, a Cophomantini tree frog (Anura: Hylidae) from the Tepui highlands of northern South America. For this, she used micro-CT scanned images to assess the skeleton of the species and compare it with other closely related taxa.
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