Unbelievably, I find myself once again at the end of another year. As is tradition here, I wanted to reflect on the achievements and outputs of the year. It has been one of the most interesting and full years of my career so far.
Scientific Outputs
I had just seven papers published in 2024 (eight if you include one published in the last week of December online ahead of print that will actually be published in 2025)—fewer than any year since 2015. This is a clear reflection of the emphasis I placed on grants and training in 2023, rather than paper writing. I had hoped that more would manifest, but in the end it was impossible to achieve more, with the many other demands on my time. However, it is important to note that the papers I did publish this year included some significant milestones.
Four of the year’s papers were taxonomic contributions, describing four new species and one new subspecies of Gephyromantis, a new Platypelis, and seven new Boophis. The last, naming frogs after Star Trek captains, made big media waves (as anticipated).
The non-taxonomic papers were, as ever, more varied. My paper with Susanne Renner, Conrad Schoch, Mark Gottschling, and Miguel Vences on sequence submission and taxonomy on NCBI GenBank that I mentioned in my 2023 summary was finally published, and made the cover of Systematic Biology. I was a coauthor on the announcement of the Amphibian Genomics Consortium in BMC Genomics. I also published a short contribution on my teaching of herpetology in the KU Animal Morphology course. The final paper, about eight years in the making, compares the skull osteology of the malagasy boas (Sanzinia and Acrantophis) to their American ecological analogues, Boa and Corallus.
Grant Failures and Successes
A new section for the academic reviews, I thought it might be worth mentioning both the positive and negative outcomes of various grant applications I submitted this year.
In 2024 I heard back from the two Starting Grants I submitted in 2023: the DFF Sapere Aude was rejected, but the ERC Starting Grant was successful. You can read more about that here. This will transform my lab and work for the years to come.
In 2024 I submitted five grants, two research grants as PI, three infrastructure grants as co-PI. Of these, both research grants (one to Villum Experiment, one to DFF Research Project 1) were rejected, as were two of the infrastructure grants. One infrastructure grant, however, was successful: a collaboration between the Natural History Museum Denmark and the Danish Technical University to develop a high-throughput micro-CT scanner. I have a research project and 1-year postdoc salary built into this grant, which is great (please do not reach out about the position, it will not open for a few years and will be advertised widely when it does).
Conferences and Fieldwork
I was fortunate enough to get to attend the World Congress of Herpetology in Kuching, Malaysia, after four years of hype. I presented some of the museomics work we have been doing in my lab as part of the Amphibian Genomics Consortium’s symposium. I was incredibly proud to see presentations by other members of my lab, as well as several former students. Prior to the conference, I also got to spend a week in Mulu National Park together with the team from Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, which was a wonderful experience.
I also ran a five-week expedition to southeastern Madagascar in 2024, together with my postdoc Alice Petzold and two students from my lab, as well as two Malagasy students and an expert guide. In spite of a drought, this was a very rewarding trip; a more complete account of the trip is coming soon. We made many new records for the area, and will be able to add a substantial collection to the Natural History Museum Denmark, when the material is exported in 2025.
The Scherz Lab
There has been a lot going on in my lab in 2024. Several Bachelor’s students came through the lab: Desiree Schumann worked on the osteology of limbs in cophyline microhylid frogs; Jonathan Rask Licht on the integration of skulls in cophylines; and Alberte Nicoline Pilemand on the amphibians of the Noona Dan expedition in the 1960s. Christian Thrane started his Bachelor’s thesis on Nectophrynoides toads from the Eastern Arc in earnest, including measurements of a truly incredible number of specimens (>400, from across Europe’s largest collections)—he will be submitting in January. Master’s student Kajsa Lundkvist completed a Thesis Preparation Project, and started on her Master’s thesis, focussing on species delimitation and description in the Anodonthyla boulengerii species group. Joakim Matthiesen started his Master’s thesis on the Platypelis grandis species complex—he will also be submitting in January. I also supervised a Project in Practice of master’s student Arvid Duekilde, who worked at Copenhagen Zoo on mortality in their Bombina bombina breeding programme.
In 2025, the lab will be undergoing some transformations, not least of which will be the addition of a PhD student as part of my ERC Starting Grant. We will also be focussing much more on comparative genomics and less on systematics. Consequently, I expect the group at first to get smaller, but to begin to grow again in 2026 and beyond, when the GEMINI project is more underway.
The Herpetology Collection
In early 2024, we were finally able to hire the new Assistant Collections Manager for herpetology at the Natural History Museum Denmark, funded by a grant from 15. Juni Fonden. Ale Panzera started in this role in March, and immediately got to work in the collection—an immediately palpable improvement to our rate and mode of operations. Ale went on parental leave in May, but we are excited for her return in 2025! In the interim, we were very fortunate to have PhD student Hayley Crowell come from Michigan for three months as part of her museum studies course, to work in the collections.
Following on from the successes of the 2023 frog rearrangement project, we have turned our attention to the rest of the herpetology collection in 2024. The salamanders are underway, and, in relatively short order, Hayley managed to completely rearrange both the geckos and the snakes. This is a huge leap forward, and makes me optimistic that we will be able to finalise the rest of the alcohol collection in 2025.
I spent a good deal of time in 2024 dealing with the herpetological collection database, which was formerly in FileMaker, was exported, and needed to be prepared for import into our current management software, Specify. The level of data inconsistency had to be seen to be believed, but through many hours of work, I managed to reduce it substantially, and finally hand in the dataset to be reviewed and imported in June. However, unforeseen issues arose that have made this still impossible, and consequently as of the end of 2024, we still have not managed to integrate our two databases. I am confident, however, that this will be finished in early 2025.
The volunteer team has continued to be a huge benefit to the herpetology collection in 2024. In addition to students registering specimens, we gained a small team of students working on identifying specimens, especially skinks from West Africa, of which we had a massive, uninventoried collection. Over the year, the total number of volunteers reduced somewhat, but I expect it to grow back to its former strength over the course of 2025.
Outreach
I have continued to lament the loss of Twitter, but am positively surprised by the rate of growth of BlueSky, especially toward the end of 2024, so I am now active there. Tumblr remains my most successful and active platform, with over 49,000 followers.
We were able to revive SquaMates Podcast in 2024, posting seven new episodes. Recording across timezones and busy schedules remains a challenge, but it has been great to return to the airwaves with my friends. Co-host Hiral Naik and I also met up with the hosts of the Herpetological Highlights podcast in Kuching and recorded a cross-over episode, which was great fun. The show made its debut on YouTube, and also finally made it onto Spotify (previously our files were just too large!)
For previous years in review, click here: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016