Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

Species with a very similar ecology compete with each other and in nature such species generally exclude one another. Their distribution ranges do not overlap but are adjacent to each another and meet at parapatric contact zones. The position of … Continue reading →

In Europe, the distribution ranges of many species were pushed back to the Mediterranean region during glacials, the cold phases of the Pleistocene Ice Age. While the climate in present day temperate Europe deteriorated, species managed to survive in Mediterranean … Continue reading →

Banded newts (the genus Ommatotriton) are stunning critters. They are also distributed in a biologically fascinating, but relatively understudied region: the Near East. All the more reason to work on them, you would say. However, an in depth study on … Continue reading →

Where recently diverged species meet in nature, they often hybridize and exchange genes. The regions where this genetic intermingling occurs are called hybrid zones. If one member of a hybridizing pair of species displaces the other, their hybrid zone would … Continue reading →