Elmer Lab

Big congrats to James Burgon , awarded "best presentation of the day" at the 15th annual Molluscan Forum, run by the Malacological Society of London.  He presented work from his Masters on revising the gastropod genus Paramelania, which is endemic to Lake Tanganyika.  (umm, next time it'll be the salamanders ... )

Two new Midas cichlid species for the Nicaraguan crater lakes: Recknagel H, Kusche H, Elmer KR, Meyer A (2013) Description of two new species in the Midas cichlid species complex: Amphilophus tolteca and Amphilophus viridis (Perciformes: Cichlidae). Aqua, International Journal of Ichthyology , 19 , 207–224.

Congratulations to Hans! Hans Recknagel, Kathryn R. Elmer, Brice P. Noonan, Achille P. Raselimanana, Axel Meyer, Miguel Vences. 2013. Multi-gene phylogeny of Madagascar’s plated lizards, Zonosaurus and Tracheloptychus (Squamata: Gerrhosauridae) . available on-line early at the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution

Good news -- Kathryn is awarded funding from University of Glasgow's John Robertson Bequest. The support is for developing new protocols for next-generation sequencing, which can be used for phylogenomic analyses across species complexes. And many thanks to Hans for all the project help!

On May 16 2013, Kathryn is invited to give a research seminar in Austria at the  Research Institute for Limnology , Mondsee (University of Innsbruck)

Kathryn speaks to students at Glasgow's Hutcheson Grammar School about, 'what's it like to be a zoologist?' Thanks to all those budding young scientists for their enthusiasm!

Our Bolitoglossa research is out in  BMC Evolutionary Biology , finding that South America's salamanders colonized from Central America ca 20MYA. The exciting thing is that such a pattern long precedes the putative ca 3MYA land bridge connection, or isthmus of Panama, and is consistent with some new and  controversial  research from  STRI suggesting that the land bridge may be much older . These salamanders are another example of cryptic species, with high genetic differentiation between putative "species" in the upper Amazon. This is a picture of a Bolitoglossa cf. peruviana that I caught in the upper Napo region of Ecuador, and which in all likelihood is not B. peruviana and instead a new species. (Descriptions are underway!) Kathryn Elmer , Ron Bonett , David Wake and Steve Lougheed . 2013  BMC Evol Biol. 13: 59