Among the world's smallest vertebrates: a new miniaturized flea-toad (Brachycephalidae) from the Atlantic rainforest.

The genus includes miniaturized toadlets with two distinct morphotypes: brightly colored species with a bufoniform phenotype and smaller, cryptic species with a leptodactyliform phenotype. The diversity of leptodactyliform species is still underappreciated, and we generally lack fundamental information about their biology. Recent sampling efforts, including DNA analyses and recordings of advertisement calls, have improved our understanding of this group.

A new reproductive mode in anurans: Natural history of Bokermannohyla astartea (Anura: Hylidae) with the description of its tadpole and vocal repertoire.

Anurans have the greatest diversity of reproductive modes among tetrapod vertebrates, with at least 41 being currently recognized. We describe a new reproductive mode for anurans, as exhibited by the Paranapiacaba Treefrog, Bokermannohyla astartea, an endemic and poorly known species of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest belonging to the B. circumdata group.

Lost and found: Frogs in a biodiversity hotspot rediscovered with environmental DNA.

Declines and extinctions are increasing globally and challenge conservationists to keep pace with biodiversity monitoring. Organisms leave DNA traces in the environment, e.g.

A new species of Pseudopaludicola Miranda-Ribeiro (Anura: Leptodactylidae: Leiuperinae) from eastern Brazil, with novel data on the advertisement call of Pseudopaludicola falcipes (Hensel).

The Neotropical genus Pseudopaludicola includes 21 species, which occur throughout South America. Recent studies suggested that the population of Andaraí, in the state of Bahia, is an undescribed species, related to P. pocoto.

The mitochondrial genome of the leaf-cutter ant Atta laevigata: a mitogenome with a large number of intergenic spacers.

In this paper we describe the nearly complete mitochondrial genome of the leaf-cutter ant Atta laevigata, assembled using transcriptomic libraries from Sanger and Illumina next generation sequencing (NGS), and PCR products. This mitogenome was found to be very large (18,729 bp), given the presence of 30 non-coding intergenic spacers (IGS) spanning 3,808 bp. A portion of the putative control region remained unsequenced.

Development of polymorphic microsatellite markers for the human botfly, Dermatobia hominis (Diptera: Oestridae).

In this report, we describe the development of 17 polymorphic microsatellite markers for the human botfly, Dermatobia hominis, an obligatory parasite of mammals of great veterinary importance in Latin America. The number of alleles ranged from 5 to 21 per locus, with a mean of 12.2 alleles per locus.

Analysis of mitochondrial DNA variability and genetic structure in populations of New World screwworm flies (Diptera: Calliphoridae) from Uruguay.

The New Word screwworm, Cochliomyia hominivorax (Coquerel 1858) (Diptera: Calliphoridae), is one of the most important insect pests of livestock in the Neotropical region. In this work, polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) was used to study the diversity and population structure of seven geographically distinct populations of C. hominivorax from most of the important livestock areas in Uruguay.