Field work to catch African Clawed frogs in San Diego

San Diego has the world's oldest extant invasive population of African clawed frogs, Xenopus laevis. I visited briefly in the summer of 1995 when I was doing my PhD studies, and successfully trapped in Tecolote Canyon and a pond in Spring Valley (Avocado) where I captured large numbers of individuals. 

The creeks in the San Diego canyons yielded large numbers of X. laevis  on this trip.

It was also great to revisit Tecolote Canyon with Alina and Tyrone who have been working there for the past 15 years or so. Now looking much better than it did in the 1990s, Tecolote Canyon is home to a thriving population of African clawed frogs. 

Thanks so much to Carla, Tyrone, Alina, Olivia and Lin for all their help in making this trip such a success.

Introducing aSCR to the San Diego Zoo

While in California this July, I was asked to give a talk on some of my work for a weekly meeting of the San Diego Zoo staff. I chose to talk about aSCR because of the relevance it has to monitoring threatened species. 

There was a good turnout and some great questions after the talk. The zoo has a great presentation room with a nice sound system on which we could listen to the calls of South African frogs. 

It was great to give a talk on aSCR again and reflect on how much we have achieved with this technique over the last 10 years. 

Measey, J. Counting chirps. Acoustic monitoring of threatened frogs in South Africa's fynbos. San Diego Zoo. 13 July 2023

Carla Madelaire at the San Diego Zoo

While visiting San Diego this month, I ceased the opportunity to visit Carla Madelaire in her new position at the San Diego Zoo. Carla's new position as researcher in the Frozen Zoo is a fascinating blend of laboratory experiments into the physiology of cell-lines indicating responses of whole organisms to phenomena such as climate change. Carla has literally hundreds of cell-lines for different species of vertebrates in the Frozen Zoo. 

 

Many of you will remember that Carla spent some time in the MeaseyLab in 2019 when she was a post-doc with Fernando Gomes (and visited together with Adriana Barsotti - see blog post here). I later caught up with Carla again in Brazil at the herp conference (see blog entry here). Carla worked on dehydration and stress in toads and still has a keen interest in these subjects.

It's going to be fascinating to see what Carla does in her new job. Really looking forward to future collaborations.

Using Museum National D'Histoire Naturelle as my address

Today I learned that from 1st August 2023, I will become an Honorary Attaché of the Natural History Museum, Paris. Readers of this blog will know that I have a long association with the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle  in Paris, dating back to the early 2000s when I worked at IRD, Bondy. Since 2006, my long term collaborator Anthony Herrel has held an associated CNRS position at the museum, and hence I've visited even more (see here).

Many of you will also know Laurie Araspin, who is registered both at the museum and at Stellenbosch University (see blog posts on Laurie here and here). 

For the next five years, I will be an attaché of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, which I hope will bring more opportunities to collaborate with researchers there. Looking forward to visiting in my new role before the end of the year.

PeerJ Expert Curations: Rapid Evolution

I was asked to curate a set of PeerJ articles around a topic, and chose to do this on Rapid Evolution. You can read the summary that I wrote and the articles I picked on this blog at PeerJ.

Curation Summary

Darwin’s (1859) theory of evolution involved ‘slow steps’ that precluded the concept of ‘sudden leaps’, instead advancing by ‘taking advantage of slight successive variations’. Although Darwin’s ideas still form the basis of our modern understanding of evolutionary processes, we now have examples of how the process can occur in the sudden leaps that Darwin himself eschewed. Documenting and investigating how these rapid evolutionary processes occur has become an important theme in 21st century life sciences. In this small selection of papers published in PeerJ Life and Environment, I highlight how scientists have gained insight on rapid evolutionary processes from multiple evidential sources, and how this has led to a better understanding of evolution today.

Rapid evolution as evidenced in PeerJ Life & Environment

Perhaps the best examples of rapid evolutionary processes are provided by the smallest living organisms. For example, Gutiérrez-Escobar et al. (2018) document how changes in genetic sequences of Helicobacter pylori sampled from patients in Columbia result in physical changes in the protein AlpA. Genetic mutations resulting in differences to transcribed proteins represent the most widely understood of evolutionary mechanisms. In their study, Gutiérrez-Escobar et al. show how the evolutionary mechanisms of gene conversion and purifying selection have diverged for this important gastric carcinogenic bacterium across a small spatial scale of Columbian cities during its short post-colonial history.

Dufour et al. (2018) use an invasion of Anolis lizards to study the evolutionary consequences on communication and behavior between native populations (A. oculatus) with and without an invasive congener (A. cristatellus). They found that in the 15 years since the introduction of A. cristatellus, populations in sympatry had decreased the proportion of display-time spent displaying (dewlapping), stressing how behavioral traits might be the first visible signs of rapid evolutionary processes taking place.

Invasive species are vulnerable to native species that may prey upon them. The ways in which these communities evolve can be surprising, especially when similar species are already present in the recipient environment. Schilthuizen et al. (2016) document how the native insect community on invasive cherries (Prunus serotina) is more diverse (but less dense) than those on native (Sorbus aucuparia) in a park in the Netherlands. Moreover, a beetle (Gonioctena quinquepunctata) collected from native and invasive trees displays different preferences in a choice test.

Regular collections of black rats (Rattus rattus) from Anacapa Island (USA) over a period of 60 years allowed Pergams et al. (2015) to make a series of detailed morphological measurements to track changes in cranial measurements. In this short period, the rats’ skulls had increased in size by between 3 and 10%, probably as a result of their island diet. Meanwhile, endemic deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) on the island became smaller after the introduction of the rats, likely through competition and predation.

The immune system must have the ability to respond rapidly to potential pathogens but this response is energetically expensive, and is predicted to be downregulated in invasive populations. Previous studies had shown immune response differences between populations of Rhinella marina from the core and at the invasion front in Australia. Selechnik et al. (2017) tried to replicate these results, using an experimental approach, but failed to find a difference between these two invasive populations. This reminds us that despite the overwhelming evidence for rapid evolutionary processes, we still need to proceed with caution when accepting results of previously published studies. More importantly, we need to be able to publish negative results in order for science to advance.

These exemplars also serve to demonstrate the utility of invasions to study rapid evolutionary processes in situ. While the impacts of these invasions are widely acknowledged to be largely detrimental to the recipient environment, they can serve as analogies to the impending changes to global climate due to anthropogenically mediated climate change. Why do some species thrive while others decline? Moreover, they offer scientists an opportunity to gain insight on the most fascinating and fundamental of all topics in life sciences and the environment: evolution.