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Abstract: The canyon treefrog, Hyla arenicolor, is a wide-ranging hylid found from southwestern US into southern Mexico. Recent studies have shown this species to have a complex evolutionary history, with several phylogeographically distinct lineages, a probable cryptic species, and multiple episodes of mitochondrial introgression with the sister group, the H. eximia complex. We aimed to use genome wide AFLP markers to better resolve relationships within this group. As in other studies, our inferred phylogeny not only provides evidence for repeated mitochondrial introgression between H. arenicolor lineages and H. eximia/H. wrightorum, but it also affords more resolution within the main H. arenicolor clade than was previously achieved with sequence data. However, as with a previous study, the placement of a lineage of H. arenicolor whose distribution is centered in the Balsas Basin of Mexico remains poorly resolved, perhaps due to past hybridization with the H. eximia complex. Furthermore, the AFLP data set shows no differentiation among lineages from the Grand Canyon and Colorado Plateau despite their large mitochondrial sequence divergence. Finally, our results infer a well-supported sister relationship between this combined Colorado Plateau/Grand Canyon lineage and the Sonoran Desert lineage, a relationship that strongly contradicts conclusions drawn from the mtDNA evidence. Our study provides a basis for further behavioral and ecological speciation studies of this system and highlights the importance of multi-taxon (species) sampling in phylogenetic and phylogeographic studies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We surveyed the geographical variation in male advertisement calls of the wide-ranging canyon treefrog, Hyla arenicolor, and found large call differences among geographically distant lineages that had been characterized by a recent phylogeographical study. To test whether these call differences were biologically relevant and could allow reproductive isolation of different lineages should they come into secondary contact, we assessed female preference in a lineage occurring in southern Utah and north-western Arizona, USA. These females exhibited a strong preference for their own lineage's call type over the calls of two Mexican lineages, but not over the calls from the geographically nearest lineage. We also identified traits that female frogs probably use to discriminate between lineage-specific advertisement calls. Our behavioural results, together with recent molecular estimates of phylogenetic relationships among lineages, will guide future work addressing the evolutionary forces that have led to this biologically significant variation in male sexual signals. © 2012 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2012, ••, ••-••. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]