Category: Uncategorized

A mysterious line where two millipede species meet has been mapped in northwest Tasmania, Australia. Both species are common in their respective ranges, but the two millipedes cross very little into each other’s territory. The ‘mixing zone’ where they meet is about 230 km long and less than 100 m wide where carefully studied.

The mapping was done over a two-year period by Dr Bob Mesibov, who is a millipede specialist and a research associate at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, Tasmania. His results have been published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

‘I have no idea why the line is so sharp’, said Dr Mesibov. ‘The boundary runs up and down hills, crosses rivers and different bedrocks and soils, and ignores vegetation type and climate differences. Its position and its sharpness seem to be the result of an unexplained biological arrangement between the two millipede species.’

Biogeographers use the term ‘parapatry‘ for the case where two species ranges meet but do not overlap, or overlap very little. Dr Mesibov said that parapatry has been reported before in other species of millipedes and in other terrestrial invertebrate animals, in Tasmania and elsewhere in the world. However, parapatric boundaries often parallel a geographical feature, such as a ridgeline, or a steep rainfall gradient.

‘There does not seem to be an ecological or a geographic explanation for this particular boundary, or for any part of it. It is also longer than any other parapatric boundary I know about. At 230 km, it is 50% longer than the boundary between England and Scotland, and the ‘border control’ is a lot better than what we humans can do.’

The two millipede species, Tasmaniosoma compitale and T. hickmanorum, are in the same genus and thought to be closely related. They were first scientifically described in 2010, by the same author and again in ZooKeys. The parapatric boundary was mapped as a background study for later investigations of speciation in this group of millipedes, and of the mechanism of parapatry.

SOURCE:
Mesibov R (2011) A remarkable case of mosaic parapatry in millipedes. In: Mesibov R, Short M (Eds) Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Myriapodology, 18-22 July 2011, Brisbane, Australia. ZooKeys 156: 71–84. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.156.1893

PREVIOUS NEWS COVERAGE:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-02/020811-millipedes/2821498 [Australian TV news story, and accompanying online text]

RELATED BACKGROUND:
Mesibov, R (2010) The millipede genus Tasmaniosoma Verhoeff, 1936 (Diplopoda: Polydesmida: Dalodesmidae) from Tasmania, Australia, with descriptions of 18 new species. ZooKeys 41: 31-80. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.41.420

MILLIPEDE WEBSITE LINKS:
Tasmanian Multipedes (a student/naturalist guide to the centipedes, millipedes and velvet worms of Tasmania)
http://www.polydesmida.info/tasmanianmultipedes

External Anatomy of Polydesmida (a student/naturalist guide to how Polydesmida millipedes are built; this is the group to which the two parapatric millipede species belong)
http://www.polydesmida.info/polydesmida/

Millipedes of Australia (a taxonomist’s resource – no images or identification keys)
http://www.polydesmida.info/millipedesofaustralia/

The National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, has obtained and released DNA barcodes for 2,808 frozen tissue samples of birds. Of the 1,403 species represented by these samples, 1,147 species have not been barcoded previously. The data are deposited in GenBank and the Barcode of Life Data Systems and are described in a form of ‘project description’ of the data release in the open access journal ZooKeys.

“This data release increases the number of bird species with standard barcodes by 91%. It is even more important, however, that the data release and the formal description of the dataset have been announced in a scholarly publication, a ‘data paper’. It allows data creators to be credited for their work, and also communicates to other scientists that such a dataset has been released and is available freely for re-use in future studies”, said the lead author Dr David Schindel from the Consortium for Barcode of Life. "It also sets out the data creators’ near-term plans for the scholarly use of the data and asks others to respect their intent for a six-month period." The paper invites others to use the data for any number of purposes immediately, and to provide feedback on any inconsistencies they find. Schindel said: "We plan to publish a more full description and analysis of the dataset in the coming months, but we saw no reason to deny access to the community and to miss an opportunity for crowd-sourced data curation."

The paper has been published as part of a policy of rapid data release for genome information known as the ‘Fort Lauderdale Principles’ launched for large genomics projects by the Wellcome Trust in 2003. These principles describe a system of shared responsibility, that would be needed in order to create incentives to construct, publish and then use large public genome datasets such as that of the Human Genome Project.

The dataset represents samples from 27 countries (Argentina, Australia, Botswana, Brazil, Gabon, Greece, Guyana, Iceland, Johnston Atoll, Mariana Islands, Mexico, Mongolia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Russia, South Korea, St. Vincent, Swaziland, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, and the former Soviet Union).

Original source:
Schindel D, Stoeckle M, Milensky C, Trizna M, Schmidt B, Gebhard C, Graves G (2011) Project Description: DNA Barcodes of Bird Species in the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, USA. ZooKeys 152: 87-91. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.152.2473

Field work by researcher Fred Kraus from Bishop Museum, Honolulu has found the world’s smallest frogs in southeastern New Guinea. This also makes them the world’s smallest tetrapods (non-fish vertebrates). The frogs belong to the genus Paedophryne, all of whose species are extremely small, with adults of the two new species – named Paedophryne dekot and Paedophryne verrucosa – only 8-9 mm in length. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Previous research had led to the discovery of Paedophryne by Kraus in 2002 from nearby areas in New Guinea, but the genus was not formally described until last year (Kraus 2010, also in Zookeys). The two species described earlier were larger, attaining sizes of 10-11 mm, but the genus still represents the most miniaturized group of tetrapods in the world.

“Miniaturization occurs in many frog genera around the world,” said the author, “but New Guinea seems particularly well represented, with species in seven genera exhibiting the phenomenon.  Although most frog genera have only a few diminutive representatives mixed among larger relatives, Paedophryne is unique in that all species are minute.”  The four known species all inhabit small ranges in the mountains of southeastern New Guinea or adjacent, offshore islands.  Their closest relatives remain unclear.

The members of this genus have reduced digit sizes that would not allow them to climb well; all inhabit leaf litter, and their reduced digits may be a corollary of a reduced body size required for inhabiting leaf litter and moss.  Habitation in leaf litter and moss is common in miniaturized frogs and may reflect their exploitation of novel food sources in that habitat. The frogs’ small body sizes have also reduced the egg complements that females carry to only two, although it is not yet known whether both eggs are laid simultaneously or at staged intervals.

Original source:
Kraus F (2011) At the lower size limit for tetrapods, two new species of the miniaturized frog genus Paedophryne (Anura, Microhylidae). ZooKeys 154: 71–88. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.154.1963

References:
Kraus, F. (2010) New genus of diminutive microhylid frogs from Papua New Guinea. ZooKeys 48 (2010) : 39-59. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.48.446

New findings by Virginie Stevens (CNRS), Jean Clobert (CNRS), Michel Baguette (Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle) and colleagues show that interactions between dispersal and life-histories are complex, but general patterns emerge. The study was published as open access paper in the journal Ecology Letters.

As dispersal plays a key role in gene flow among populations, its evolutionary dynamics under environmental changes is particularly important. The inter-dependency of dispersal with other life history traits may constrain dispersal evolution, and lead to the indirect selection of other traits as a by-product of this inter-dependency.

Identifying the dispersal’s relationships to other life-history traits will help to better understand the evolutionary dynamics of dispersal, and the consequences for species persistence and ecosystem functioning under global changes. Dispersal may be linked to other life-history traits as their respective evolutionary dynamics may be inter-dependent, or, because they are mechanistically related to each other.

The authors identified traits that are predicted to co-vary with dispersal, and investigated the correlations that may constrain dispersal using published information on butterflies. The quantitative analysis revealed that (1) dispersal directly correlated with demographic traits, mostly fecundity, whereas phylogenetic relationships among species had a negligible influence on this pattern, (2) gene flow and individual movements are correlated with ecological specialisation and body size, respectively and (3) routine behaviours only affected short-distance dispersal. Together, these results provide important insights into evolutionary dynamics under global environmental changes, and are directly applicable to biodiversity conservation.

Specialist species with narrow tolerance to temperature are also those butterflies that have weak dispersal ability. For such species, the combination of habitat fragmentation and climate warming is thus a kind of ‘double penalty’. Those species should thus be the priority targets in conservation actions. Besides, these results show that the size of a butterfly is not a reliable proxy of most of the components of its ability to disperse across inhospitable parts of landscapes, and is particularly poor at describing species’ ability to maintain spatial gene flow.

Original source:
Ecology Letters, (2011) doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2011.01709.x
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2011.01709.x/abstract

Larkspurs, monkshoods, and aconites are plants, widely cultivated for their beauty and medicinal properties. They all belong to the Delphinieae, a natural group of 650-700 species ranging from Eurasia into North America, with a few species on tropical African mountains.

A broadly sampled molecular phylogeny for this group has revealed that three Mediterranean species constitute an ancient separate evolutionary line that is the sister group to all remaining Delphinieae. The British physician John Hill already recognized these species’ distinctness in 1756, and Jabbour and Renner here resurrect the genus name he had proposed for them.

Of the three species in Hill’s genus Staphisagria, one is an important medicinal plant found all around the Mediterranean basin, the other two are endemic to Corsica, Majorca, Sardinia, and the Archipelago of Hyères in the South of France. In an article in the open access journal Phytokeys, Jabbour and Renner from the Institute of Systematic Botany at the University of Munich illustrate and discuss the newly recognized genus, explaining how its three species share traits that fit neither in Delphinium nor in Aconitum, fitting with their long independent evolutionary history.

Original source:
Jabbour F, Renner SS (2011) Resurrection of the genus Staphisagria J. Hill, sister to all the other Delphinieae (Ranunculaceae). PhytoKeys 7: 21–26. doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.7.2010

Electronic infrastructures open new horizons for collaboration and acceleration of the research on world’s biodiversity. International collaborative platforms, such as scratchpads.eu,  yield  opportunities, unknown before, to scientists to put together historical and newly collected data coming from different sources and working groups, says a special issue of the open access journal ZooKeys presenting the results of the EU-funded project ViBRANT.

ViBRANT stands for “Virtual Biodiversity Research and Access Network for Taxonomy” and is a European Union e-infrastructure project running December 2010 to 2013 that will support the development of virtual research communities involved in biodiversity science. ViBRANT combines  the efforts of scientists from 17 European institutions to provide a more integrated and effective framework for those managing biodiversity data on the Web.

 
“ViBRANT is not only about e-infrastructures” commented the project coordinator Dr Vincent Smith from the Natural History Museum, London. “ViBRANT’s core mission is to mobilize the treasures of biological data accumulated over centuries of scientific discoveries and to open them for collaboration to all who are keen to describe, record and safe the life on our Planet!”

ViBRANT’s mission is clearly reflected by the collection of research and review articles published by the project partners but also by scientists from USA and Australia.  The value of this book is re-inforced by the exemplar papers that demonstrate how innovations in e-infrastructures are implemented in real time and on real data.

The book focuses on opening and publishing of biodiversity data, a process that is largely promoted and supported  by institutions, international organisations and governments because it allows the multiplication and intensification of efforts invested by the previous and contemporary generations of scientists.

The 150th jubilee issue of ZooKeys.

For more details, please contact:

Dr. Vincent S. Smith, Cybertaxonomist
The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD, UK
Web: http://vsmith.info/, http://scratchpads.eu/, http://phthiraptera.info/
E-mail: vince@vsmith.info, Tel: +44 (0) 207 942 5127

Dr D.McL. Roberts
Dept. Zoology, The Natural History Museum,
Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD, Great Britain
Tel: +44 (0)20 7942 5086
Email: dmr@nomencurator.org
Web page: http://scratchpads.eu
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/projects/euk-extreme/

The open access zoological journal ZooKeys published by Pensoft reported a substantial growth in 2011, in comparison to 2010, says an analysis dedicated to journal’s jubilee 150th issue, By the end of November 2011, the journal published more than 10,000 pages and 420 articles (to compare with 4,962 pages and 180 articles in 2010). Since its launch in July 2008, ZooKeys published more than 19,000 pages and 780 articles of valuable information on new discoveries in the fascinating world of animals (from mammals and birds to insects and corals). The growth rate will reach 120% by the end of the year.

In a field like taxonomy which constantly generates data, dissemination is one of the most crucial aspects. An open access journal has the benefit of easy distribution of information, leading to increasing relevance of the data, as it is being recognized by a larger audience.

ZooKeys is the first journal in the fields of biodiversity and taxonomy to implement a detailed schema for mark-up of its content, which allows automated extraction and dissemination of information from within the text of an article. The mark-up technology, through so called “semantic enhancements”, allows the user to add enormous additional information from external Web-based sources, which is updated in real time on query, during the reading process.

“ZooKeys is an amazing and true success story” said the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, Dr Terry Erwin from the Smithsonian Institution, Washington. “The key of the ZooKeys success is simple and  can be expressed easily: open access and perpetual innovations!”

The unique editorial workflow of ZooKeys was created and implemented in a close collaboration with the non-profit Swiss organization Plazi, and the National Library of Medicine in the USA. The Journal supplies information to the world’s largest biodiversity platforms, such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Encyclopedia of Life, KeyCentral, as well as to wiki-based platforms such as Wikispecies, Wikimedia Commons, Species-ID, and many others.

“ZooKeys is not just a journal. It is an interactive environment that transforms the process of conventional publishing and sets up new standards in scholarly communication in biodiversity sciences. We are happy that our services help to describe so many still undiscovered species on Earth and to contribute to their identification and protection!” added the journal’s managing editor Dr Lyubomir Penev from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia.

Original source:
Erwin T, Stoev P, Georgiev T, Penev L (2011) ZooKeys 150: Three and a half years of innovative publishing and growth. In: Smith V, Penev L (Eds) e-Infrastructures for data publishing in biodiversity science. ZooKeys 150: 5–14. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.150.2431

Open access to information about biodiversity is of crucial importance to society, directly affecting areas such as conservation and climate change research and education. “Non-Commercial” restrictions on the reuse of this information are a major barrier to addressing these problems, says a review paper published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Halting the loss of biodiversity demands that information on organisms, ecosystems, their properties, and their interactions, is easily found and readily available. This requires sharing. Creative Commons (CC) provides a set of licenses to facilitate this. However, Non-Commercial (NC) restrictions are commonly added to Creative Commons licences, intended to prevent commercial exploitation. The article shows that the ambiguity between “non-for-profit” and “non-commercial” prohibits many legitimate re-uses of NC licensed materials, and imposes significant risks that affect for-profit and not-for-profit organizations alike.

“The concept of ‘commercial advantage‘, the heart of the NC licenses, is very broad and ill defined” says lead author Dr Gregor Hagedorn from the Julius Kühn-Institute in Berlin, Germany. “It potentially excludes all public relation activities that increase the recognition of an organisation and may thus confer commercial advantages later on. Furthermore, the non-open NC licenses are usually incompatible with open Creative Commons licenses, severely restricting the use of NC licensed materials.”

The review arose from discussions within an EU funded infrastructure project (ViBRANT) that several authors of the article participate in, on how best to license materials produced within the project. To ensure the widest possible use of biodiversity information, the authors of the ZooKeys publication argue that publicly funded projects should use open CC licenses such as CC BY or CC BY-SA. These are used by most Open Access publishers, the Wikimedia Foundation projects, and many other open content initiatives.

Original source:
Hagedorn G, Mietchen D, Morris RA, Agosti D, Penev L, Berendsohn WG, Hobern D (2011) Creative Commons licenses and the non-commercial condition: Implications for the re-use of biodiversity information. In: Smith V, Penev L (Eds) e-Infrastructures for data publishing in biodiversity science. ZooKeys 150: 127–149. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.150.2189

Part of the work was carried out within the European Union’s Virtual Biodiversity Research and Access Network initiative (ViBRANT).

Organisms living on small islands are particularly threatened by extinction. However, data are often lacking to objectively assess these threats. A team of German and British researchers used satellite imagery to assess the conservation status of endangered reptiles and amphibians of the Comoro archipelago in the Western Indian Ocean. The researchers used their results to point out which species are most threatened and to define priorities for future protected areas. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

A typical problem in species conservation efforts, particularly in tropical regions, is the lack of information on the extent of suitable habitat available for threatened species. "The analysis of satellite images allows us to precisely estimate the remaining extent of rainforest and other natural habitats," says Oliver Hawlitschek from the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology. This approach has rarely been used in species conservation, and this is the first time that it is applied to all species of a group in an entire country.

In addition to their satellite imagery analyses, the researchers conducted intensive field surveys in order to detect the habitat preferences of the reptiles. "We found that only 9% of the island area is still covered by natural forest, but many native species have adapted to habitats under human influence like orchards, plantations, and gardens", Hawlitschek says. "Those species which are dependent on the remaining natural habitats are the ones most threatened by extinction".

This research was conducted in collaboration with Bristol Conservation and Science Foundation’s (BCSF) project in the Comoros. "This collaboration has provided an exciting piece of research for the Comoros. Our project will be using this knowledge and data in combination with our research on birds, reptiles, butterflies, and species of conservation importance to guide our conservation actions which are working towards protecting the remaining forests and threatened species of Anjouan", says Katie Green, Head of Ecological Research and Monitoring, BCSF.

The researchers chose the Comoros as a case study for their methodology because, in relation to large islands like neighbouring Madagascar or continental regions, these islands cover little area and are inhabited by a limited number of species. However, they hope that their methods will also be applied to other areas, where more threatened species are concerned. "Natural habitats are destroyed at a fast pace in many regions of the world", says Frank Glaw, herpetologist at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology. "We therefore need tools to assess quickly and objectively where we have to set our priorities in species conservation, especially for species endemic to small islands which are particularly vulnerable to extinction."

Original source:
Hawlitschek O, Brückmann B, Berger J, Green K, Glaw F (2011) Integrating field surveys and remote sensing data to study distribution, habitat use and conservation status of the herpetofauna of the Comoro Islands. ZooKeys 144: 21–79 doi: 10.3897/zookeys.144.1648

Nowadays, more and more animal habitats are being fragmented, or lost. Many species need assistance and conservation of their environments to survive, and it is important to know the best way this can be achieved. A research team from France, Poland and Germany has determined two butterfly movement strategies and their relative importance.

The study is based on the Bavarian populations of Dusky Large Blue butterflies (Maculinea nausithous). The species is endangered and listed in the European Union’s Habitats Directive. The butterflies were marked with waterproof numbers on their wings, in order to be repeatedly observed. The study was published in the “Journal of Animal Ecology”.

A large part of the movements are made over relatively small distances of a few hundred meters. There were, however, a few individuals (around 2.5%) that travel several kilometres. These movements are used for conservation analyses, because they are important for landscape level effects. The methodology of the shown approach will help with improving future analysis of similar data, where until now no distinction has been made between long and short distance movements.

More efficient and better recommendations for landscape configuration and design, as well as better conservation methods can be expected from gaining information on the portion of the individuals travelling the long distance. We see this study as a major achievement in this field.

Original source:
Thomas Hovestadt, Birgit Binzenhöfer, Piotr Nowicki, Josef Settele: Do all inter-patch movements represent dispersal? A mixed kernel study of butterfly mobility in fragmented landscapes. Journal of Animal Ecology 80: 1070–1077. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2656.2011.01848.x

Additional information:
This work has been carried out within the EU projects SCALES (FP7 grant 226852), MacMan (FP5 grant EVK2-CT-2001-00126), and CLIMIT (FP6 BiodivERsA Eranet grant funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the French ANR) as well as Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education project N N304 064139.