Triturus karelinii

Wielstra, B., Litvinchuk, S. N., Naumov, B., Tzankov, N. & Arntzen, J. W., 2013, A revised taxonomy of crested newts in the Triturus karelinii group (Amphibia: Caudata: Salamandridae), with the description of a new species, Zootaxa 3682 (3), pp. 441-453 : 448

Systematics of T. karelinii s. l.

The type locality of T. karelinii is “the northeast of the Iranian region along the southern shore of the Caspian Sea” ( Strauch, 1870). Litvinchuk and Borkin (2009) restricted the type locality to the coast of the Gulf of Gorgan, Iran, based on the report of the expedition during which the type material was collected ( Karelin, 1883). The type locality is within the range of the eastern T. karelinii s. l. species ( Fig. 1 ). Therefore, the name T. karelinii sensu stricto should be applied to the eastern T. karelinii s. l. species. As a vernacular name we suggest Caucasian Crested Newt or Karelin’s Crested Newt. A considerable number of localities (n = 235) are known from the former Soviet Union (reviewed in Litvinchuk & Borkin, 2009) but distribution data for Iran are sparse (n = 13 in Wielstra et al., 2012). Its presence in the extreme north-east of Turkey is suspected but awaits confirmation ( Wielstra et al., 2013a).

Considering that no previously proposed name is applicable to the central/western T. karelinii s. l. species, we provide a new name, for which the authors are J. W. Arntzen and B. Wielstra:

Figures

FIGURE 1. The distribution of Triturus karelinii s. l. The inset shows the distribution of Triturus (the red / green interdigitating shades refer to an area where T. marmoratus and T. cristatus are distributed sympatrically) and the cut-out shows the distribution of the three nuclear gene pools comprising T. karelinii s. l. in detail. The interdigitating shades of blue represent the area in which the central T. karelinii s. l. nuclear gene pool carries western T. karelinii s. l. mitochondrial DNA. The three white dots in the cut-out show type localities with, from left to right, Vrtovać, Serbia for T. arntzeni, Ostar Kamak, Bulgaria for T. ivanbureschi sp. nov. and the coast of the Gulf of Gorgan, Iran for T. karelinii sensu stricto. The black squares show six of the seven populations (a-b and d-g) representing locality 14 of T. arntzeni in Litvinchuk et al. (1999 )); the left white dot corresponds to the seventh locality (c; see text for details).