Forensic Vertebrate Zoology: Museum science in a changing world

While the dramatic decline and extinction of many species of frogs has received much attention over the past two decades, the status of salamander populations is much less well known, partly due to their secretive natural history and to the difficulty of finding them in the wild. This talk will focus on the use of both fieldwork and museum collections from the 1970s that documents a striking decline of Mexican and Guatemalan salamanders. After seeing a pattern of major salamander declines, a collaborative effort resulted in the development of a new technique to detect a lethal amphibian disease in preserved museum specimens. This has allowed us to partially solve a decades-old mystery of what may have caused frog and salamander declines in Central America. Museum collections are proving useful in new and unforeseen ways, which shows the importance of maintaining and expanding these collections during a time of rapid global change.

Speaker: Sean Rovito, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, UC Berkeley