The negative effects of pollution on amphibians are especially high when animals are additionally stressed by other environmental factors such as water salinity. However, the stress provoked by salinity may vary among populations because of adaptation processes. We tested the combined effect of a common fertilizer, ammonium nitrate (0-90.3 mg N-NO3NH4/L), and water salinity (0-2 per thousand) o...

Female birds of several species have control over the production of daughters and sons. However, most studies failed to find a relationship between egg size and sex. This is intriguing as adjustment of egg size would constitute a powerful tool for the female to meet different resource demands of the sexes, particularly in size dimorphic species. Our results show that, within clutches of black-h...

Temperature influenced the developmental rate and survival of embryos of Pelophylax nigromaculata. The total incubation period decreased from 254.07hrs at 18.20 ± 0.49°C and 162.80hrs at 20.87 ± 0.57°C in two experiments. The proportion of normal embryos and survival of eggs until hatching were higher (85.2%) when the eggs were incubated at 20.87 ± 0.57°C. However, death of eggs until hatching ...

In an experiment carried out in the laboratory in beakers, the avoidance of ammonium chloride, isolated or combined with sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate, in aquatic habitat by froglets of Pelophylax perezi was studied. The results obtained suggest that nitrogen polluted treatments were not avoided by froglets of the studied species. However, despite the non-avoidance of the aquatic environmen...

Twelve polymorphic microsatellite loci were isolated from an (AC)n- and (AG)n-enriched DNA library for the endemic Chinese frog Pelophylax hubeiensis (Ranidae). The number of alleles per locus ranged from two to eight, with a mean of 5.17. The observed and expected heterozygosities ranged from 0.226 to 0.839 and from 0.204 to 0.826, with means of 0.568 and 0.656, respectively. No significant li...

Pelophylax plancyi (Lataste, 1880), chosenicus (Okada, 1931) and hubeiensis (Fei & Ye, 1982) were described chronologically from East Asia. The three species have similar morphological molecular characteristics, but the taxonomic relationships amongst them long been ambiguous. To deal with this issue, we examined newly-obtained topotypic specimens of P. , for comparison. Furthermore, invest...

To determine the feeding sites preferred by adult gold-spotted pond frogs, Rana plancyi chosenica, and the foods that induce favorable growth of the frogs in the laboratory, we conducted two separate experiments between 27 May and 12 July 2007 in a vivarium. In the first experiment, we counted the number of crickets eaten by four gold-spotted pond frogs in a 60 min period at four different feed...