Camilo Lopez-Aguirre edited untitled.tex  almost 9 years ago

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\textit{Carollia} is a genus of phyllostomid, fruit-eating bats widespread distributed and highly abundant in the Neotropic. These species are crucial for different ecological processes, like seed dispersal and restoration of tropical forests. Due to their ecological plasticity, species of this genus are often found in disturbed and transformed ecosystems that are under high levels of pressure. It is also common two find two or even three sympatric species all along South America.   Currently, up to eight species are accepted in this genus (\textit{C. benkeithi}, \textit{C. brevicauda}, \textit{C. castanea}, \textit{C. manu}, \textit{C. monohernandezi}, \textit{C. perspicillata}, \textit{C. subrufa}, \textit{C. sowelli}), and it has been discussed the taxonomic identity of another one (\textit{C. colombiana}). The taxonomy of these species is unclear based on morphological and morphometric data , and some of them have been considered to be complex of species yet unsolved. This genus has been of particular interest in Colombia -highest phyllostomid species richness in the world-, where two species have (\textit{C. colombiana} and \textit{C. monohernandezi})have  been described in the last decade 15 years,  and at least four of the six South American species of this genus  are present. A broad variety of studies have focused in this genus, offering detailed information regarding their evolutionary history, behavior, functional morphology and ecology. Also, other studies have tried to shed light on its taxonomy, studying the morphological boundaries between species, as well as the effect of both biotic and environmental traits on its morphological plasticity. Despite the lack of concise agreement, the general consensus sets size variations as the main source of morphological differentiation between species. Hence, this feature has been widely used as a taxonomic clue to identify some of these species. However, published research using molecular approaches indicate that the morphological description and discrimination of these species is inaccurate, and misleads researchers from solving the identity of unknown cryptic species.    

The utility of decomposing the morphological variation in its symmetric and asymmetric components in order to elucidate differences between groups has not been sufficiently explored. Previous studies show the adequacy of this approach to detect specific patterns of morphological variation that could even be useful to taxonomically discriminate species within a genus. This methodology has only been used to study the morphology of taxa with fractal and radial symmetry.  In order to further explore the importance of shape variation for the morphological delimitation and identification of \textit{Carollia} species, in this study, it was aimed to isolate and study the patterns of symmetric and asymmetric morphological variation of the genus \textit{Carollia} in Colombia.