======================================================= W A T E R F R O G N E W S L E T T E R September 1997 ======================================================= The water frog home and information pool can be reached through the word wide web at http://waterfrogs.scs.fsu.edu/waterfogs.html You can send email to frog@genetics.washington.edu ------------------------------------------------------- In 1995, following the Second International Symposium on Ecology and Genetics of European Water Frogs in Wroclaw (Poland, 1994), a data base of information on and addresses of biologists working with water frogs was made. Many students of the group may not realize it, but the site got some 6000 visits in 1996 and is currently at 6370 visits for 1997. Although several visitors asked to have their names added to the address list and many general questions were answered during the last two years, input from the water frog research community was sparse; for example, only one additional group supplied abstracts of their published papers. We are now (following a gathering of water frog specialists at the Third World Congress of Herpetology) making a second attempt to (a) provide useful information within this community, (b) increase the level of sharing ideas among research groups, (c) serve as a directory of addresses and expertise, and (d) serve the general public (Internet) as an enjoyable science site. Several web pages will help advance these four goals. "News and Views" will tell what is going on in this field. It will provide access to new literature, with pointers to abstracts when they are available. It can also serve as a forum for discussion and argumentation (but the site will have editors, so keep cool!) about exciting hypotheses in the biology, especially relating those ideas to broad general areas of evolution, phylogenetics, and ecology. The News and Views section needs input from all of you. Send your thoughts, hints, abstracts,part texts, full texts, and new literature that you have discovered to: frogs@genetics.washington.edu An address list contains recent addresses (mail and email) of people interested in water frog research, and describes their areas of expertise. Several of the mail addresses are currently missing. Please supply yours and complain if you see typos. If you want to include or update your area of expertise, be sure to include keywords that describe your work. Possible examples: "skull morphology, landmarks, Pelophylax" or "population genetics, Mediterranean water frogs, allozymes, mtDNA-RFLP, mtDNA control region" or "selection, experimental, larval ecology" For longer statements there is an additional field. Please review your entry for correctness and precision. Send us corrections and greater detail. For names from A-L: beerli@scs.fsu.edu. For names from M-Z: dirk@hydra.biologie.Uni-Mainz.DE. Species list and general biology: If you have good photos of water frogs or want to share basic information with us and the world, write some text for these sections and send your drafts to me (beerli@scs.fsu.edu) so we can discuss layout and content. I'll edit contributions for consistency and basic English, while trying to stay true to your ideas. I hope that we can send out a newsletter every month. I look forward to reading contributions from all of you. Peter Beerli, Seattle 1997 with contributions from Dirk Schmeller, Thomas Uzzell, Hansjurg Hotz ================================================================= News and Views ================================================================= The information here is shortened. For an enlarged version, visit http://waterfrogs.scs.fsu.edu/waterfrogs.html -New layout of the "water frog home page" (12 September 1997). -Addresss list updated. ***Please review the information we entered.**** Send us corrections and greater detail. For names from A-L: beerli@scs.fsu.edu. For names from M-Z: dirk@hydra.biologie.Uni-Mainz.DE. -Literature: Hansjuerg Hotz is providing his water frog bibliography. You can view it or download it. We intend to update this continuously, so if you have just published a manuscript or know of titles not presently in the bibliography, please email them to hotz@zoolmus.unizh.ch. This guarantees that we can all share new findings. -New Literature (with abstracts) Hotz, H. Uzzell, T. Berger, L. 1997. Linkage groups of protein-coding genes in western Palearctic water frogs reveal extensive evolutionary conservation. Genetics 147(1):255-270 Semlitsch, R. D., H. Hotz, G.-D. Guex. 1997. Competition among tadpoles of coexisting hemiclones of hybridogenetic Rana esculenta: support for the Frozen Niche Variation model. Evolution 51(4): 1249-1261 Do you know other very recent literature.