Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

The New Atlas of Amphibians and Reptiles of Europe was published in 2014 in the journal Amphibia-Reptilia. In the new atlas, the ‘smooth newt’ and the Carpathian newt were mapped. It turns out that the original smooth newt comprises five … Continue reading →

Ommatotriton nesterovi (left) and O. ophryticus. The introduction of species outside their native range is worrisome from the point of view of conservation, as they can negatively impact native species. Banded newts naturally occur in the Near East. Yet, an … Continue reading →