Climate change is expected to send many species on one-way migrations in search of new homes as their old ranges become inhospitable. Whether or not they can survive this century depends a great deal on what happens along the route, a new study has shown. Leer más.
El tritón palmeado es un pequeño anfibio común en el oeste de Europa, aunque en la península Ibérica sólo se encuentra en la franja más septentrional desde Cataluña hasta Aveiro. ¿Cómo podemos explicar su distribución actual? Este ha sido el objetivo del estudio dirigido por el investigador Mario García París del Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales del CSIC y que ha sido publicado en Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. Para reconstruir la genealogía de la especie y conocer aspectos de su historia evolutiva reciente, los investigadores han estudiado la distribución geográfica actual de ciertos marcadores genéticos y han analizado los rastros que procesos históricos de aislamiento, expansión, etc., han ido dejando en estos marcadores. Leer más.
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.
