212 Correspondence All articles available online at http://www.salamandra-journal.com © 2015 Deutsche Gesellschat für Herpetologie und Terrarienkunde e.V. (DGHT), Mannheim, Germany Correspondence SALAMANDRA 51(2) 212–214 30 June 2015 ISSN 0036–3375 Another candidate species of Pelomedusa (Testudines: Pelomedusidae) from the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Zoltán Tamás Nagy 1 , Jos Kielgast 2 , Maggie Moosig 3 , Melita Vamberger 3 & Uwe Fritz 3 1) Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, JEMU, Rue Vautier 29, 1000 Brussels, Belgium 2) Section for Freshwater Biology, Institute of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 4, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark 3) Senckenberg Naturhistorische Sammlungen Dresden, Königsbrücker Landstr. 159, 01109 Dresden, Germany Corresponding author: Zoltán Tamás Nagy, e-mail: lustimaci@yahoo.com Manuscript received: 11 July 2014 Accepted: 29 July 2014 by Stefan Lötters Helmeted terrapins (Testudines: Pelomedusidae: Pelo- medusa) have a wide distribution and occur in most of sub-Saharan Africa and on the southwestern Arabian Pen- insula (Iverson 1992, Gasperetti et al. 1993). In addi- tion, introduced Pelomedusa subrufa (Bonnaterre, 1789) sensu stricto (Vargas-Ramírez et al. 2010, Wong et al. 2010, Petzold et al. 2014) occur in most of western and southern Madagascar (Iverson 1992). For a long time, Pelomedusa was thought to comprise a single species only, P. subrufa. However, in 2010 two independent studies chal- lenged this view: Vargas-Ramírez et al. (2010) and Wong et al. (2010) identiied nine deeply divergent genetic lineag- es of Pelomedusa. hese lineages difered for the mitochon- drial cytochrome b gene (cyt-b), a frequently used marker for species delimitation in turtles and tortoises (e.g., Fritz et al. 2012a, b, Kindler et al. 2012), to a degree equalling or exceeding the divergences between many other conge- neric turtle species (Vargas-Ramírez et al. 2010). Recent- ly, Fritz et al. (2014) and Petzold et al. (2014) examined the situation in more detail and discovered additional ge- netic lineages of Pelomedusa. hese authors concluded that Pelomedusa is a species complex, and Petzold et al. (2014) described six new species and resurrected three further taxa from the synonymy of P. subrufa, so that ten species of Pelomedusa were now recognized formally. In addition, Petzold et al. (2014) identiied up to four genetically dis- tinct candidate species of which too few specimens were available for naming them. Although Petzold et al. (2014) used range-wide sam- pling, many parts of the vast distribution range of Pelo- medusa remained insuiciently covered. hus, it seems plausible that further undescribed species might exist. In the present paper, we report the discovery of another possi- ble candidate species of Pelomedusa from southwest of the Albertine Rit. On 22 November 2011, we found an adult Pelomedusa (Fig. 1) in a shallow looded roadside ditch, approximately 10 km north of Gombela on the road to Katwe in the Kundelungu National Park (Katanga, Demo- cratic Republic of the Congo; 10.688680° S, 27.830932° E, 1,365 m above sea level; locality marked with a red star in Fig. 2. his specimen with the ield tag UP497 had a cara- pace length of approximately 152 mm and is now in the col- lection of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS:ZTN:UP497). A tissue sample from this terrapin was used to generate 12S, cyt-b and ND4 sequences (GenBank accession num- bers 12S: LM993295; cyt-b: LM993296; ND4: LM993297) as described in Fritz et al. (2014). he resulting mitochon- drial sequences were concatenated and merged with the data set of Petzold et al. (2014). Maximum likelihood analyses were performed as described there. In the result- ing best tree (not shown), UP497 is with bootstrap support of 95% sister to P. neumanni. Petzold et al. (2014) used uncorrected p-distances for the 12S and cyt-b genes as a tool for species delimitation in Pelomedusa. If such values are calculated using MEGA 6.06 (T amura et al. 2014) and the pairwise deletion option, UP497 and P. neumanni dif- fer by mean divergences of 1.34% (12S) and 4.78% (cyt-b), respectively. According to Petzold et al. (2014), the ten recognized species of Pelomedusa and two unnamed can- didate species difer in the 12S gene by average uncorrected p-distances ranging from 2.60 to 12.15% and in the cyt-b gene, by values between 5.64 and 18.60%. In addition, two genetic lineages provisionally identiied with P. galeata dif- fer by 1.79 (12S) and 7.50% (cyt-b); and two lineages within P. somalica, by 1.83 (12S) and 5.98% (cyt-b). Each of these