Capital Breeding in Cooler Cape Town

A new study suggests that guttural toads are changing their breeding patterns to accommodate the cooler, drier Cape Town climate.

In this study, Giovanni Vimercati compared the mass of different organs from guttural toads from their native population in Durban (see post here) and the invasive population in the peri urban area of Constantia, near Cape Town. The relative masses of the different organs provide information about how these toads invest their energy. 

Native frogs in Cape Town save up much more energy in their storage organs prior to breeding, because of the inhospitable dry summers. Whereas the guttural toad in its native Durban, uses energy as they generate it during the breeding period. These two strategies are known as capital- and income-breeding, respectively. 

Giovanni's study suggests that even though they have only been in Cape Town for less than 20 years, they have already started moving toward a capital breeding strategy, typical of the native species in the area. However, he only found this difference in females and not males.

The MeaseyLab is conducting lots of interesting work on invasive populations of Guttural Toads at the moment. To see more blog posts about this work, click here.

Vimercati, G., Davies, S. & Measey, J. (2019) Invasive toads adopt marked capital breeding when introduced to a cooler, more seasonal environment. Biological Journal of the Linnnean Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1093/biolinnean/blz119 pdf

Where did the invasive Guttural Toads come from?

The Guttural Toad, Sclerophrys gutturalis, has a large distribution in Africa, from Ethiopia in the North to South Africa in the South, and from Angola in the West to Mozambique in the East. That’s one of the largest distributions of any of Africa toad. No wonder then that there are also some invasive populations of Guttural Toads, which the MeaseyLab has been studying for the last 5 years or so (see more recent stories on Guttural Toads, click here).

Guttural toads have been invasive in Mauritius and Reunion for nearly 100 years (since ~1922), and have been in Constantia (near Cape Town) for another 20 years, but where did those colonising toads come from? This was the central question behind the MSc study of Nick Telford (now of SANBI, but then of UWC under the supervision of Alan Channing), and now a paper published today in Herpetological Conservation and Biology.

Nick took tissues of toads that had been collected from all over the continent (with some help from Alan and John), plus those sequences already published on Genbank, and to them he collected intensively in South Africa. We also obtained tissues from each of the invasive populations: Constantia, Mauritius and Reunion. He sequenced a common mitochondrial gene and made a phylogeny with all the sequences. The result was somewhat surprising: all of the invasive populations shared alleles which were naturally found around the South African port city of Durban.

The result fits in well with the historical information already published on the Guttural Toad invasions. A man called Gabriel Regnard, a Director of the dock management company in Mauritius, was known to have introduced them to Port Louis. It seems most likely that Regnard had sourced the animals from a nearby port. From there they were introduced to Reunion in 1927. Guttural Toads were first heard calling from the garden of Jonathan Ackerman, soon after the family relocated from Durban in 2000. The genetics suggests that the animals moved may have been eggs or tadpoles that were moved unwittingly with ornamental pond plants.

Knowing that all toads originated from Durban, has made it easier to study these invasions together, as we have been able to compare both invasive populations and those of the source in one study. With the publication of this genetic study we can continue to explore invasions of the Guttural Toad. There are also some oddities in the genetics which suggest some more investigation, like the most southerly records of animals from Port St Johns and Coffee Bay, which appear to have the genetic signature of animals from Gauteng.

You can find the publication Open Access here:

Telford, N., Channing, A. & Measey, J. (2019) Origin of invasive populations of the Guttural toad Sclerophrys gutturalis Herpetological Conservation & Biology. 14(2):380–392.

GS, WoS or Scopus - what's the difference?

Have you ever wondered why Google Scholar (GS) scores are so inflated compared to other citation databases like Web of Science (WoS) or Scopus? I've always noticed that Scopus has better coverage that WoS, and that GS is bigger than both (and a lot messier with lots of weird duplicates and poorly entered stuff), but is there anything more to it than that? 

Well it seems that there are some people who have already thought about this, and come up with a good idea of exactly what's different. Martín-Martín et al (2018) have done a great job of analysing all this stuff from some 2.5 million citations. What they found inspired me to write this blog post, in which I've chopped out the Life-Sciences stuff to show you. But I encourage you to go read the article for yourself (there's a link at the bottom, and here).

I have been known to take the odd peak at my Google Scholar profile over the year, and see how it's coming along. I rarely check on WoS or Scopus, 'cos it's a bit of a faff getting signed in and doing the search. Plus it looks so much smaller when one is habituated to seeing those double digits in GS! However, I've always been a bit uneasy about citing my GS citation rate, H-index or i10 (among others that they give) as I've never really known what all that extra represents. Something grey and unseemly? Well, it turns out that it's all good stuff, and perhaps GS is the better one to cite as it's a more inclusive index: more inclusive of different document types and different languages.

• Top left:  the entire dataset of ~2.5 million citations shows that nearly half are in all 3 databases, but that more than a third are in GS only.
• Top right: shows life sciences alone (~0.5 million citations) and over half (~57%) shared by all 3, and less than a third in GS only. 
• Middle: shows the kinds of items that you are getting in GS vs all 3 databases. GS gives you lots of theses, book chapters, conference papers, and other unpublished stuff like preprints
• Bottom: Shows the different linguistic contributions. Almost all English in the overlapping 3 databases, while GS encompases a lot of Chinese, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, etc. (sorry not to list them all, but you can see what they are above). 

This is actually really interesting, and allows you to interpret your GS results as a more inclusive citation index. While WoS and Scopus aren't exclusively English or journal publications, they are mostly. But that extra third that GS gives you allows you to show the extra scope that your work is getting outside that English journal mainstream. Is your GS score more than a third higher than your WoS or Scopus score? If yes, then your work is having a greater impact elsewhere in the world, and there's nothing wrong with that.

The excerpts from the two tables above show how well GS correlates with both WoS and Scopus in our area (Biological Sciences). It also tells you by how much the GS score is likely to be inflated - 1.90 for GS/WoS and 1.45 for GS/Scopus. Again, if you deviate from this with a higher score, you can give yourself a pat on the back for having work that's reaching more people in more parts of the world. 

So, just for this blog, I've looked at all three databases for my citations today to see how my score compares: 1.72 for GS/WoS & 1.62 for GS/Scopus. Hmm... I wonder what it means when you get one higher and one lower? Any ideas anyone?

Martín-Martín, A., Orduna-Malea, E., Thelwall, M. and López-Cózar, E.D., 2018. Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus: A systematic comparison of citations in 252 subject categories. Journal of Informetrics, 12(4), pp.1160-1177.

Talk for the Universidade de São Paulo - USP

While doing some work with Carla, Adriana and Fernando at USP I presented my talk on Anfíbios invasores: Uma visão da África austral sobre oportunidades e insights.

Some of you will remember the visit by Carla and Adriana to the MeaseyLab earlier in 2019 (if not, see here, here and here). Carla and Adriana went back to USP and analysed all of their results collected in South Africa. I spent the week writing up one of the papers with Carla and Yuri - who analysed all of the videos. It was great fun to work with them, and I hope that we'll have another blog about the paper that comes out soon!

Measey, J. Anfíbios invasores: uma visão da África austral sobre oportunidades e insights. Universidade de São Paulo - USP, São Paulo, Brazil

Species on the Move in Kruger

Regular readers of this blog will know all about Mohlamatsane (aka Mac) and his work on modelling the distribution of three South African amphibians. You can read more about Mac's work in a blog post I wrote about his thesis defence (here). This week Mac presented his work to the "Species on the Move" held this year in Kruger National Park. 

Mac's talk used his physiological and performance experiments on three South African anurans to fit a species distribution model and project this into future climate scenarios. He was really pleased to spend some time talking to Wilfred Thuiller who was also at the conference.

Congratulations Dr Mac! It's great to see with mixing with the stars.