The microbial diversity was strongly marked by seasonality, with no sex effect and a marginal life stage and annual effect. The microbiota showed seasonal fluctuations along the two sampled years, primarily due to changes in the relative abundances of fermentative bacteria (mostly families Lachnospiraceae and Ruminococcaceae), without any major compositional turnover. Leer más.
This study highlights the importance of sample choice, integrative analyses, and validation methods to not incur into taxonomic inflation, providing a set of already available tools to assess and validate population structure, gene flow, and SDMs before describing new species. Leer más.
We found negative carryover effects of chronic exposure of larvae to ammonium on adult inflammatory response, which could imply a greater susceptibility to pathogens and parasites. However, this damage is only true for males, which, according to the immunocompetence handicap hypothesis, could be a consequence of a testosterone-triggered impairment of male immune function. In disagreement with our prediction, however, we detected no differences in the inflammatory response of agrosystem frogs to phytohemagglutinin as compared with natural habitat conspecifics. Leer más. Noticia en castellano.
El sapo común o, mejor dicho, el sapo común espinoso (Bufo spinosus, recientemente diferenciado del sapo común, Bufo bufo) es cada vez menos común en España. Son múltiples las causas de su lento, pero progresivo declive, pero ahora tenemos más evidencias de que el hongo patógeno de anfibios introducido de Asia podría ser aún más peligroso para esta especie de lo que creíamos. Una nueva investigación indica que, al contrario de lo que pensábamos, los adultos de esta especie, y no sólo los recién metamorfoseados, también podrían estar muriendo por causa de la enfermedad fúngica. Leer más. Ir al artículo original.
As a result of the obtained outputs, it seems that D. spitzenbergerae stat. nov., D. mirabilis stat. nov. and D. obscura stat. nov. should be accepted as the species level, this later with subspecies D. o. bischoffi comb. nov. and D. o. macromaculata comb. nov.. Also, we propose two new taxa: D. josefschmidtleri sp. nov. and D. spitzenbergerae wernermayeri ssp. nov.. It has also been shown that “lantzicyreni” subspecies belong to D. rudis instead of D. valentini. The extensive revision has contributed to subsequent studies to more accurately understand the past histories of species in the genus Darevskia. Leer más.
