Parental care is an important reproductive strategy that enhances offspring survival and increases parental fitness. In anurans, particularly the family Rhacophoridae (Old World treefrogs), parental care exhibits remarkable variation in both form and function, including egg attendance provided by either sex and tadpole attendance involving females provisioning unfertilized eggs to oophagous larvae. However, the evolutionary history and ecological correlates of these behaviors remain poorly understood. In this study, we reconstructed the evolution of parental care behaviors in the family Rhacophoridae using phylogenetic comparative methods based on a mitochondrial DNA phylogeny comprising 44 species across 19 genera. Our results indicate multiple independent origins of parental care in Rhacophoridae and suggest that parental care in this family has evolved repeatedly, in association with trade-offs in reproductive investment. We also found an evolutionary trend toward male-biased sexual size dimorphism (SSD) correlated with paternal care behavior. We propose a novel hypothesis that this pattern is driven by territorial behavior associated with paternity defense, rather than being a direct outcome of the caring behavior itself.

This study investigated frog-biting dipteran species using newly designed frog-calling traps in Taiwan. The trap effectively collected specimens from both families Culicidae and Corethrellidae, demonstrating its utility. Host preference analysis revealed that Odorrana swinhoana (Boulenger, 1903) and Kurixalus eiffingeri (Boettger, 1895) were most frequently associated with collected specimens of Corethrellidae. Additionally, the corethrellids were predominantly attracted to a sound frequency around 2022.2 Hz. Future studies should expand to include a greater variety of frog species across more diverse regions to further broaden our understanding of host preferences. Then, DNA barcoding was also conducted on the four collected species of Culicidae: Armigeres subalbatus (Coquillett, 1898), Uranotaenia nivipleura Leicester, 1908, Ur. macferlanei Edwards, 1914, and Mimomyia luzonensis (Ludlow, 1905), and the mitochondrial genome of Corethrella nippon Miyagi 1980 was firstly sequenced and completely annotated. Mitogenome-based phylogenetic analysis confirmed that C. nippon formed a clade with Corethrella condita Borkent, 2008. In our analysis, family Corethrellidae clustered with Culicidae; however, the inter-family phylogenetic relationships within Culicoidea appeared paraphyletic, particularly concerning family Chaoboridae.