The genus Indirana is the only representative of the endemic amphibian family Ranixalidae in the Western Ghats, India with twelve valid species (Modak et al. 2015). Indirana gundia is classified as a critically endangered frog species as per the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (IUCN 2015) and listed as the 88^th of the 100 most Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) amphibians (http://www.edgeofexistence.org) of the world with an EDGE score of 5.65 (Isaac et al. 2007). The species was discovered in 1986 in the forests of Kemphole and Sakleshpur (12^o49.50'N, 75^o35.50'E), Karnatka, India, by Dubois 1986) and is known to occur only in the type locality (Gundya) at an altitude of 200 m asl. Morphology (Nair et al. 2012) and genetic data along with photographs (Padhye et al. 2014) of this species have been provided recently. In the absence of recent reports on the geographical distribution, the present study was designed to provide new distribution data of this species with the help of molecular tools.

Visual encounter survey Method (Heyer et al. 1994) was adopted to capture thirteen individuals from Konnakkad, three from Kanamvayal and five from Aralam under the license from the Kerala Forest Department (No. WL-12-1713; Voucher numbers are given in Fig. 2). They were released immediately in their respective habitats after collecting toe clips. Since the mitochondrial DNA sequences are available for this species, we used 16S mitochondrial gene sequences to diagnose specimens from three localities: (1) Konnakkad (12°22'1"N, 75°22'21"E) (2) Kanamvayal (12°17'41.2"N, 75°28'38.0"E) and Aralam (11°52'43.7"N, 75°53'19.0"E) in the northern part of Kerala (Fig. 1). DNA was extracted from the collected toe clips using DNeasy Animal Blood and Tissue Kit (Qiagen). The genomic DNA was amplified with 16SA-L and 16SB-H primers (Palumbi et al. 1991) for 16S ribosomal RNA fragments of the mitochondrial gene as its utility in amphibian species identification is well established (Vences et al. 2005). The thermocycling conditions for the amplification of 16S gene as follows: 95°C for 5 min followed by 40 cycles of 95°C for 30s, 55°C for 40s, 72°C for 90s followed by a final extension step at 72° for 5 min. PCR products were purified and sequenced using an ABI 3730 capillary sequencer following manufacturer's instructions. We then compared the sequences with reference sequences of I. gundia from the type locality, available from GenBank (Acc. Numbers: KM386532 and KM386533), using BLAST. To further corroborate our results, we computed genetic distance (p-distance; Suppl. material 1) and maximum likelihood (ML) phylogenetic tree using MEGA 6 (Tamura et al. 2013) under K2+I model (Kimura 1980) as the best fitting model, along with the 16S sequences of other Indirana species distributed in Kerala (Fig. 2, Suppl. material 2). The obtained sequences (494 base pair in length) were deposited in GenBank under accession numbers KT282197-KT282223.