E. andersoni in Taiwan

[TJ]

Does anybody happen to know what it the basis for the assertion that E.andersoni is not endemic to Japan, that it also exists in China, namely on Taiwan?

I had heard rumors before of it known or thought to have once existed in Taiwan, if not existing there now, and it occurred to me that at least a couple Chinese books on amphibians of China list E.andersoni among the Chinese caudates. I used to wonder if these were written by ravanchist scholars as the Ryukyu kingdom did use to pay tribute to the Chinese emperor before it was absorbed by Japan

Today I was reading an article by Prof. Zhao Er-mi of the Chengdu Institute of Biology --"Distribution Patterns of Amphibians in Temperate Eastern Asia" -- in which he includes a table showing E.andersoni as a species found both in the Ryukyus (RK) and on Taiwan (TW)....

 

[TJ]

Zhao may be one of China's foremost herpetologists, but Hidetoshi Ota, who is known to be the top in his field when it comes to the herpetofauna of the Ryukyu Islands, has a similar table in his paper The Current Geographical Faunal Pattern of Reptiles and Amphibians of the Ryukyu Archipelago and Adjacent Regions in which E.andersoni is shown to occur {only in Japan, specifically in the Amami and Okinawa insular groups (the table does include a column for Taiwan).

I wonder what gives...

 

[wouter]

I believe that a museum in Taiwan has three museum specimens, wich should have been caught in Taiwan... I don't know more about it though.

 

[TJ]

Thanks for that input, Wouter.

For what it's worth, the website of the American Museum of Natural History shows the distribution of E.andersoni as follows:

"Okinawa and Anami, Ryukyu Is., Japan; northern Taiwan, China."

That should be spelled "Amami", but whatever. I assume it means Taiwan as part of China, not Taiwan and China.

http://research.amnh.org/herpetology/amphibia/references.php?id=23264

 

[TJ]

Here is what Amphibia Web at the University of Berkeley has to say:

"The species is distributed on five islands of the Ryukyu archipelago...Reports about its occurrence on Taiwan are based upon three museum specimens and need to be confirmed (Zhao & Adler, 1993; Zhao, 1999). The species is presently considered extinct on Taiwan (Zhao, 1998)."

There are explanations here in Chinese if anybody can read them:

http://www.wwfchina.org/csis/search/detail.shtm?cspcode=040090004

http://www.blueanimalbio.com/Amphibia11.htm

(Message edited by tj on September 08, 2004)

 

[TJ]

From what I've been reading since, it seems the consensus in Japan is that E. andersoni is an endemic species and that its occurrence in Taiwan, either now or in the past, is pretty doubtful. Matsui,in his authoritative work on amphibians (in Japanese), lists E. andersoni among 4 amphibian species inhabiting the Ryukyu Archipelago that have no genetic lineages in either the main Japanese island or Taiwan, having evolved in the Ryukyu area over millions of years. It may or may not be the case that E.andersoni's ancestors came to populate the area via land bridges from the continent through Taiwan.

But three specimens in a museum somewhere? They could have come from anywhere. I wonder what kind of testing has been done on them.

I guess it just comes down to: who you believe?

(Message edited by TJ on May 27, 2006)