earticle

영어

Recent advances in phylogenetic analysis techniques have played a significant role in discovering and documenting new species. In South Korea, the number of Hynobius salamander species doubled in the past decade. However, since morphological traits to distinguish species are not as clear as the genetic divergence, the issue of species identification is still a major controversy. This study aims to investigate the possibility of identification of Korean Hynobius species through an expert survey by participants of the Korean Society of Herpetologists (KSH). Our results showed that only 9.3% of 43 participants answered that they could distinguish Korean Hynobius species. Of those who answered they could identify the salamanders, 45.5% identified the species based on the address where the salamanders were found. Most of the participants answered that the main reason for not being able to distinguish the salamander species was there were no external differences. The participants answered that the five salamander species were indistinguishable due to morphological similarity (88.6%), lack of experience (9.6%), and similar size (3.8%). Our results showed that the morphometrical identification of the Korean Hynobius species may not be effective and push the people to record the species based on the location rather than the species itself. In addition, this confusion has the potential to become a major problem limiting the study of existing species as well as newly described ones.