Investigation of the morphological variation in Hyrcanian brown frog (Rana pseudodalmatina Eiselt & Schmidtler, 1971)

Rana pseudodalmatina Eiselt & Schmidtler, 1971 is a brown frog species endemic to the Hyrcanian forest. The Hyrcanian wood frog, is distributed in the southern margin of the Caspian Sea in the lowland forest. Here, we used a broad sampling of these frogs across their distribution range to assess their morphological variation and structure of populations. In order to investigation of the morphological variation in Hyrcanian wood frog, 13 morphological characters in more than 53 specimens were studied. Statistical significance for a hypothesis of sexual dimorphism of the frogs was tested using ANOVA to compare difference of means of each character between sexes and of a multivariate analysis of variances (MANOVA) to compare vectors of means of the two sexes. Patterns of phenetic relationships between local populations were investigated by one way ANOVA, Principal component analysis (PCA), discriminate function analysis (DFA) and clustering analyses with UPGMA algorithm. Results of compare mean ANOVA between sexes in R. pseudodalmatina showed statistical significances for five characters and Multivariate analysis of variances indicated difference between mean vectors of the males and females (P≤ 0.05). In the intraspecific level, based on morphometric characters, there are at least two main populations of R. pseudodalmatina in the northern Iran: an eastern group (Loveh, Behshahr, Sari) and a western group (Salmanshahr, Langarud, Rasht, Astara).