World Congress Of Herpetology 7: A New Caribbean Skink Fauna

A terrible photograph of Blair Hedges’ presentation (sorry, I was stuck in the back of the room).

Blair Hedges used his talk at WCH7 to present his exciting new results with Caribbean skinks. You can read more about this work in the paper he published in Zootaxa earlier this year with Caitlin Conn (pdf link from Hedges webpage) and in Jonathan’s previous AA post on this paper. Using analyses of a dataset that includes four genes (three mitochondrial and one nuclear) from 136 individuals representing 14 of 16 genera, Hedges and Conn report discovery of dozens of previously unrecognized species and advocate recognition of 16 genera of skinks across the new world. Unfortunately, many of the new species identified by Hedges and Conn seem to already be extinct, and Hedges showed some very compelling data to support the hypothesis that the decline of skink populations was a response to the arrival of the mongoose.