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.
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
Congratulations to Nick (aka Wei Cheng Tan) on the submission of his thesis!
You may remember that some time back (it was 12 January 2017) we welcomed Nick to the MeaseyLab from Université de Poitiers to conduct his thesis work on South African agamas. Nick went back and worked very hard on the write up, finally submitting his thesis entitled: Is the radiation of South African agamids adaptive?
The thesis was supervised by Anthony Herrel, Didier Bouchon and John Measey. It makes great reading, and we really look forward to seeing the papers in press!
Fantastic work, Nick!
Here's a video showing how Nick did the performance work. To see more videos, subscribe to our channel.
Stephen Doucette-Riise submitted his MSc thesis (Zoology, UCT) on Western Leopard Toads back in 2012 while I was working at SANBI. Stephen worked hard on trialing a number of microsatellite candidates to profile WLTs in the Overstrand area (Stanford to Aghulas).
Despite completing his MSc, the microsatellite study wasn't finished as Stephen didn't have enough time to profile enough microsatellites for the project. Jessica da Silva recently stepped into the breach and produced this microsat note on the toad.
da Silva, J.M., Feldheim, K.A., Measey, G.J., Doucett-Riise, S., Daniels, R.J., Chauke, L.F. & Tolley, K.A. (2017) Genetic diversity and differentiation of the Western Leopard Toad (Sclerophrys pantherina) based on mitochondrial and microsatellite markers. African Journal of Herpetology 66: 25-38
The IUCN Red List needs people to make assessments, and then those assessments need reviews. Reviewing over 400 assessments took place this week at SANBI's Kirstenbosch Research Centre.
Some well know faces from the world of South African herpetology were present. How many do you recognise?