In a paper in Ecology Letters, Regan Early and Dov Sax examined the projected “climate paths” of 15 amphibians in the western United States to the year 2100. Using well-known climate forecasting models to extrapolate decades-long changes for specific locations, the researchers determined that more than half of the species would become extinct or endangered. The reason, they find, is that the climate undergoes swings in temperature that can trap species at different points in their travels. It’s the severity or duration of those climate swings, coupled with the given creature’s persistence, that determines their fate. leer más.
New analytical methods are improving our ability to reconstruct robust species trees from multilocus datasets, despite difficulties in phylogenetic reconstruction associated with recent, rapid divergence, incomplete lineage sorting and/or introgression. In this study, we applied these methods to resolve the radiation of toads in the Bufo bufo (Anura, Bufonidae) species group, ranging from the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa to Siberia, based on sequences from two mitochondrial and four nuclear DNA regions (3490 base pairs). We obtained a fully-resolved topology, with the recently described Bufo eichwaldi from the Talysh Mountains in south Azerbaijan and Iran as the sister taxon to a clade including: (1) north African, Iberian, and most French populations, referred herein to Bufo spinosus based on the implied inclusion of populations from its type locality and (2) a second clade, sister to B. spinosus, including two sister subclades: one with all samples of Bufo verrucosissimus from the Caucasus and another one with samples of B. bufo from northern France to Russia, including the Apennine and Balkan peninsulas and most of Anatolia. Leer más.
Lagartija de tamaño medio, siendo dentro del genero Acanthodactylus una de las especies que alcanzan mayor longitud total; alrededor de 250 mm para los machos y 205 mm para las hembras (Schleich et al, 1996; Geniez et al, 2004). Leer más.
La caída en la fabricación de ladrillos en Bailén (Jaén) ha provocado el abandono de la mayoría de las canteras de donde se extraía la arcilla. A su vez, las canteras en desuso se han ido regenerando de forma natural y ha ido apareciendo vegetación palustre, que ha atraído a anfibios y aves acuáticas. Lo que fue un paisaje de trajín y polvo, se ha convertido con la crisis en un páramo en el que han surgido oasis de vida natural. Leer más.
Hay otras ranas famosas pero en España el batracio más reconocidose posa desde hace medio milenio sobre una calavera labrada en lafachada plateresca de la Universidad de Salamanca tras la que descansan los tesoros más valiosos de la biblioteca histórica de la institución. Leer más.
