Author Archives: Ben Wielstra

Male T. macedonicus. Picture by Michael Fahrbach. Historical biogeographical scenarios based on DNA data have in the past mostly relied on a single genetic marker: mitochondrial DNA. As it became easier and cheaper to consult more and more nuclear DNA … Continue reading →

My first PhD student, Isolde van Riemsdijk, graduated on 11 September 2019. Two of Isolde’s chapters focused on banded newts (see posts here and here). Two other chapters dealt with toads and were rightfully excluded from this website (but see … Continue reading →

Two crested newt studies, previously highlighted here and here, support historical hybrid zone movement – movement on the scale of hundreds of kilometers and spanning multiple millennia. Before these crested newt examples, little to no empirical evidence for historical hybrid … Continue reading →

Genetic studies in the family Salamandridae have regularly revealed cryptic species – genetically distinct species that previously went unrecognized due to their morphological similarity. The most recent salamandrid example is provided by the banded newts (genus Ommatotriton). While the split … Continue reading →

Triturus is great, showing intricate ritualized mating behaviour where males congregate at leks and perform elaborate dances to wow the females, representing an adaptive radiation reflecting gradients of aquaticness, providing strong support for the hypothesis of historical hybrid zone movement, … Continue reading →

The main motivation to conduct the outgoing phase of my Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles was to design a ‘sequence capture by target enrichment’ pipeline for Triturus. At UCLA, Evan McCartney-Melstad and Brad Shaffer possess … Continue reading →

It’s official, on 1 February I will start my ERC Starting Grant project as a tenure track Assistant Professor at the Institute of Biology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Meanwhile I will be Honorary Researcher at Naturalis Biodiversity Center. … Continue reading →

Male T. carnifex. Picture by Michael Fahrbach. Invasive species can threaten native biota by means of competition, predation and infection. A less-known risk is genetic pollution: the (partial) replacement of local genotypes via hybridization. A particular challenge of quantifying invasive … Continue reading →

I am pleased to announce that I have been awarded an ERC Starting Grant. In this five year research program I will untangle the evolution of balanced lethal systems. Natural selection is supposed to keep lethal alleles (dysfunctional copies of … Continue reading →

During a 2010 fieldtrip in Serbia, Jelka Crnobrnja-Isailović first introduced us to a cool pond near Vlasi, situated in the hybrid zone between T. ivanbureschi and T. macedonicus. This pond is inhabited by a big crested newt population, with individuals … Continue reading →