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Secrets of silent toads

01 August 2017

Shelley publishes on Rose's Mountain Toadlet's amazing reproduction

Few frogs come close to the amazing Rose's Mountain Toadlet. For most of the year they hide away, very rarely sited on their mountain tops. But on moonlit evenings in late August they emerge and go into a frenzy of breeding.

In this really nice paper, Shelley Edwards and co-authors describes what happens after the eggs are laid and the tadpoles quickly grow in their mountain puddle homes. 

This is an amazing natural history paper based on intensive surveys of two populations on the Cape peninsula.

Read all about it:

Edwards, S, Tolley, KA & Measey, GJ (2017) Habitat characteristics influence the breeding of Rose's dwarf mountain toadlet Capensibufo rosei (Anura: Bufonidae) Herpetological Journal27: 287-298. pdf

  Frogs  Lab  News

Welcome Jennica!

27 July 2017

MeaseyLab welcomes Jennica Poongavanan

At our lab meeting on Thursday we were delighted to welcome Jennica Poongavanan to the extended MeaseyLab students.

Jennica started her MSc with Res Altwegg and Ian Durbach at the University of Cape Town's Department of Statistical Science. Jennica will be part of the SEEC group and will be co-supervised by John at CIB. Jennica's project is to take the density data generated by Marike Louw and the volunteers doing aSCR on the Cape peninsula this year, and turn them into Species Distribution Models. 

  aSCR  Lab

CIB in BES bulletin

17 July 2017

British Ecological Society (BES) bulletin covers work of CIB

The work of the Centre for Invasion Biology was covered in the British Ecological Society's bulletin this month. 

This included the fabled win by Marike Louw in South Africa's Young SCience Communicator's Competition for her article on aSCR. See the blog post here and what the BES said about it below:

  aSCR  Lab

Nitya Invades Scottish Islands

11 July 2017

Nitya presents a poster at Island Invasives Conference

PhD student Nitya Mohanty presents a poster on his work on invasive species of the Andaman Islands at the Island Invasives Conference 2017, Dalhousie Building, University of Dundee, Scotland. Nitya's work was well received with many envious of his idilic island field site in the Bay of Bengal. 

  Frogs  Lab  meetings

Marike shows the aSCR project to ZSSA in Pretoria

04 July 2017

Pretoria falls silent to hear Marike's peninsula moss frog.

MSc student, Marike Louw, presented her aSCR work to an eager audience at the Zoological Society of Southern Africa's (ZSSA) meeting at CSIR Pretoria, South Africa

In this eagerly anticipated talk, Marike layed out her latest findings in the National Geographic sponsored project. 

Also at the ZSSA, Alex Rebelo presented his MSc work on the pyxicephalid radiation. 

Marike Louw, Res Altwegg, Andrew Turner, Jasper Slingsby, Ben Stevenson, David Borchers, & John Measey Densities of Arthroleptella lightfooti across the Cape Peninsula: preliminary results from acoustic spatial capture-recapture. 2017 Combined Congress of the Entomological and Zoological Societies of Southern Africa CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa

Alex Rebelo & John Measey Frog Olympics: exploring the locomotor ecomorphology of the pyxicephalid radiation in southern Africa. 2017 Combined Congress of the Entomological and Zoological Societies of Southern Africa CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa

  aSCR  Frogs  meetings
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