185 The tortoises are back in town

Tortoises return to an island in the Galapagos and prove themselves to be solid ecosystem engineers.

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Main Paper References:

Tapia Aguilera W, Gibbs JP. 2023. Rewilding giant tortoises engineers plant communities at local to landscape scales. Conservation Letters 16:e12968. DOI: 10.1111/conl.12968.

Other Mentioned Papers/Studies:

Loconsole M, Stancher G, Versace E. 2023. Crossmodal association between visual and acoustic cues in a tortoise (Testudo hermanni). Biology Letters 19:20230265. DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2023.0265.

Starck, J. M., Schrenk, F., Schröder, S., & Pees, M. (2022). Malformations of the sacculus and the semicircular canals in spider morph pythons. Plos one, 17(8), e0262788.

Other Links/Mentions:

Scinax crospedospilus by Mario Sacramento from https://amphibiaweb.org/cgi/amphib_query?where-genus=Scinax&where-species=crospedospilus

Charles Darwin Foundation. Studying the ecology and distribution of the invasive treefrog Scinax quinquefasciatus https://www.darwinfoundation.org/en/research/projects/invasive-treefrog

Editing and Music:

Podcast edited by Emmy – https://www.fiverr.com/emmyk10 

Intro/outro – Treehouse by Ed Nelson

Species Bi-week theme – Michael Timothy

Other Music – The Passion HiFi, https://www.thepassionhifi.com