Geomorphometric analyses of the peruvian species of carollia (Chiroptera: Phyllostomidae)

The genus Carollia comprises eight species, and in spite of their wide distribution and abundance, the knowledge about their morphology and differentiation is still incipient, and several studies have revealed complex intra-and interspecific morphological variation. The objective of this study was to analyze the skull and hemi-mandible variation of the species of Carollia using a morphogeometric approach and to test, in the Peruvian species, if the main reported clades recovered by Velazco (2013) are distinguished morphologically. We analyzed 826 specimens using geometric morphometric approaches on three cranial and one hemimandibular views. The overlapping was performed using Generalized Procrustes Analysis and interspecific variation and morphological groups were tested by statistical analyses. Our results found a wide overlap among the species, but the differences are statistically supported. We found that the ventral view of the skull was the most important view to discriminate between species and that the canonical discriminant analysis recovered two statistically supported morphological groups, congruent with the main clades of the genus (C. brevicauda-C. manu-C. perspicillata versus C. benkeithi-Carollia sp.). Carollia manu is morphologically intermediate between C. perspicillata and C. brevicauda, whereas C. benkeithi and Carollia sp. are almost completely overlapped in the analyzed mor-phospace. We agree with other authors in that size is the main variable that allows to discriminate species.