ABSTRACT

The diversity of anurans in Evbuabogun Community, Ikpoba/Okha LGA, Edo State, Nigeria was studied. A total of 82 anuran individuals belonging to four families, four genera and six species were encountered. All the species were fully identified. The overall species richness (d) was 1.135 and overall species diversity (H’) was 1.38. The Ptychadenidae was the most dominant family, Bufonidae and Dicroglossidae were both subdominant families while the least dominant was from the family Arthroleptidae. From the snout-vent length measurement of the anurans encountered, Leptopelis hyloides was the smallest anuran species encountered while Hoplobatrachus occipitalis was the biggest in size. More males were encountered compared to the females. The Ptychadenidae family had the highest number of males while the Bufonidae family had the highest number of females. Ptychadena oxyrhynchus had the highest number of male (46.0%) while Sclerophrys maculata had the highest female (31.3%) individuals. Hoplobatrachus occipitalis and S. maculata were represented by 28.0% and 24.0% male, respectively while L. hyloides was represented by 2.0%. Hoplobatrachus occipitalis and P. oxyrhynchus were represented by 28.1% and 21.9% females, respectively while P. pumilio, S. regularis and L. hyloides had 9.4%, 6.3% and 3.1% female’s representation, respectively. From the study, it is evident that Evbuabogun Community is an altered environment with the tropical forest trees being cut down and replaced with buildings for human habitation. All these could have led to the reduced species richness and diversity observed in this study. Efforts should be made to ascertain the shift in anuran species structure that might have occurred as a result of this transition and also on how to conserve the available anurans.