Systematic revision of the Hemiphyllodactylus yunnanensis complex with descriptions of six new species

Hemiphyllodactylus Bleeker 1860, one of the fastest-growing genera in the Gekkonidae, comprises 22 species distributed in China, among which Hemiphyllodactylus yunnanensis is believed to be a species complex. Despite the gradual description of Hemiphyllodactylus populations in various regions of China as new species in the past decade, the taxonomy of the Hemiphyllodactylus yunnanensis complex remains unresolved. We collected Hemiphyllodactylus populations of the yunnanensis complex from 11 locations. Based on 1809 bp dataset (1039 bp mitochondrial ND2 gene, fragments of 375 bp nuclear C-mos + 395 bp PDC genes) and a solo 1039 bp NADH dehydrogenase subunit 2 (ND2) sequence fragment dataset, the constructed phylogenetic topology revealed that our samples fell into seven independent lineages of Clade 7. Automatic Barcode Gap Discovery (ABGD) results are consistent with our phylogenetic findings. The uncorrected genetic pairwise distance between populations exceeded 4.2% in ND2 gene, and there were also significant morphological differences among them. Therefore, we consider the specimens that cluster with the topotype specimens as true Hemiphyllodactylus yunnanensis, and describe the other six lineages as new species, respectively.