Comments on: Drought drives toads to mate with other species

By: Christina

Christina — Sat, 14 May 2011 03:39:15 +0000

Intriguing. I rather suspect mate choice is a lot more complex than generally assumed. I wouldn’t be surprised if we found other cases where females’ choice depends on the local situation, but that aren’t as dramatic as switching species.

By: smithm9

smithm9 — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 08:20:00 +0000

Ed Yong, you da man! I am fascinated with intelligent people because they concern themselves with things that probably don’t concern those of us on the low side of the Bell curve. It’s like, who cares about frogs most days? I enjoyed the article because I found a gramatical error in the boy’s piece. “females also showed no willingness for breed with other species” That’s allright, I live in the deep south and I don’t talk right most of the time and I was born here. Randomly it has dawned me that Asians are obviously the superior race of people. ‘course you would expect a judgement like that form a southerner. Anyway, I’m glad the world has people smarter than me so that we have someone to blame when things go wrong. See, some people would have said “when things go south” but I resent that remark. Just kidding. I’m just sayin’.

By: Brian Schmidt

Brian Schmidt — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:05:52 +0000

The prevalence of genes telling Plains spadefoot females when to switch preferences means some of those hybrid descendants are reintegrating into the Plains spadefoot gene pool. If they’re bringing Mexican spadefoot genes with them, then that’s a one-way gene flow between species.
It would be interesting to look at the behavior of the hybrid females – presumably some of them breed with Mexican spadefoots, at least under shallow water/poor health conditions. That seems like an avenue for gene flow to eventually go into the “pure” Mexican spadefoot gene pool.

By: DeLene

DeLene — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:51:10 +0000

Neat to see this on your blog (I began reading your blog only a few months ago, so did not see the original post). Ironically, I wrote a research profile on Pfenning for her college’s research magazine just last fall after she received a $1.5M NIH grant to continue this line of inquiry.My story is on pg. 12 of the PDF magazine (pg. 14 of the PDF): http://www.delene.us/PDFs/TDB-UNC-CAS-ToadTracker.pdf. I thought about her work when Kays’ new coywolf paper came out in September. Can’t help but wonder if it’s a similar scenario that led the eastern Canadian wolves to interbreed with the eastern-expanding coyotes. (Kays paper: http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/09/23/rsbl.2009.0575.abstract.)

By: IanW

IanW — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:55:08 +0000

I wondered what that toad was doing humping my leg the other day (not that day, the other one). Now I have a serious case of spadefoot and have to get around in a wheelchair….

By: OftenWrongTed

OftenWrongTed — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 03:39:45 +0000

Yet another fine reminder of the Physicians instruction to not become dehydrated.

By: MattK

MattK — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:32:50 +0000

This is very interesting, I remember when this study came out. There are also a lot of counter examples in other anurans in which character differences between two closely related species are more different at the contact zone then in allopatry (where the species do not co-occur). Emily Moriarty Lemmon demonstrated it in chorus frogs. It has also been shown in narrow mouthed frogs in the southern US (see here.