The ridge of mountains that runs parallel to Madagascar’s east coast descend in short order into rolling hills, followed by sand dunes, and ultimately meet the Indian Ocean. These rolling hills and sand dunes were once cloaked in low-elevation humid forest and littoral forest. Today those habitats are some of […]
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 […]
As I recently announced, I have recently secured an ERC Starting Grant for my project on the genomics of miniaturisation in vertebrates. One of the things that was really valuable in the application process was reading others’ experiences on their websites and blogs, so I think it appropriate that I […]
Finding these frogs sometimes requires considerable trekking; pursuing strange new calls, to seek out new frogs in new forests; boldly going where no herpetologist has gone before. — Vences et al. 2024 At the right time of year along rushing streams in the humid rainforests that stretch the length of […]
I am overjoyed to announce that my European Research Commission (ERC) Starting Grant (StG) on the genomics of miniaturisation in vertebrates has been funded! This means 1.5 million euros for my lab over the next five years, to explore how the evolution of reduced body size is driven, shaped, and […]
2023 was an exceptionally challenging year, with a lot of interesting developments to reflect on. My year was unusual, in that it was dominated not by publications or travel, as is usual for me, but instead by grant writing and training. Scientific Outputs I had nine papers published in 2023, […]
In the 15th of August issue of the journal Salamandra, my colleagues and I published a new species of leaf-tailed gecko from northern Madagascar, Uroplatus garamaso! You can get the PDF of the description here. In 2009, I was on a voluntourism trip to northern Madagascar. I was there to study […]
About a year ago, I decided to set out on a major curatorial project, as one of my first large-scale projects for the herpetological collections of the Natural History Museum of Denmark (NHMD), where I am the curator of reptiles and amphibians. The project: to update the taxonomy and organisation […]
How does an ecological gradient, like the slope of a mountain, affect the evolution of organisms that interact with it? Does it promote ecological speciation? And does it act the same way in different organisms? These questions are largely still unanswered. Today, my colleagues and I have published a study […]
Here at the end of 2022, it is time to do as I have done since 2016, and give some reflections on the year. These focus mostly on the academic aspects of the year, though for reasons that will soon become apparent, the personal and academic aspects of 2022 were […]
When you walk along streams in Madagascar, you frequently hear sounds like doors creaking and stomachs gurgling. These are the calls of little muddy-brown frogs in the Mantidactylus frog subgenus Brygoomantis. Today, my colleagues and I have published our magnum opus on these charming but secretive little frogs, describing 20 new […]
For my twelfth or thirteenth birthday, my parents gifted me a copy of the then-newly published Natural History of Madagascar. This mammoth tome, comprising 1728 pages, set a benchmark in the literature on every topic it covered, and it covered almost everything you could think of. I spent many nights […]
Open access (OA) is increasingly demanded by funders, and of course is desired by researchers and readers alike. Yet some journals charge incredibly high fees for you to publish your research open access. This has led to a lot of researchers being resigned to either publish behind a paywall, or […]
I have just returned from three weeks at the Udzungwa Ecological Monitoring Centre (UEMC) in central Tanzania, just outside Udzungwa Mountains National park, where I have been teaching as one of four main lecturers on a Field Training Course, part of the Erasmus+ project ‘Developing curricula for biodiversity monitoring and […]
Today, my colleagues and I have published a monograph on part of the gecko genus Lygodactylus, describing eight new species from Madagascar in the journal Zootaxa. Lygodactylus are diurnal geckos, but most species are not as flashy as their cousins, the Phelsuma day geckos. They come mostly in mottled greys […]
