Danielle Hinchcliffe

University of Salford · School of Science Engineering and Environment

The slender and elusive Nototriton brodiei is known only from a few specimens at two separate sites in the Sierra de Merendn, in Guatemala and Honduras. We present the first record of an aggregation of three adults of N. brodiei on a single leaf in the cloud forest of Cusuco National Park, Honduras. We observed two males and one female walking toge...

Freshwater habitats are vitally important for vertebrate diversity and ecosystem service provision. These habitats are diverse in scale and type, ranging from vast wetlands and tropical flooded forests to small streams and ponds, but are all equally important to the diverse range of vertebrates they support. The loss and degradation of freshwater h...

This end of season report is submitted as a review of the summer 2016-2017 seasons and the research activities of the Operation Wallacea research teams in Cusuco National Park, Honduras; over the course of the two summers. This report contains a summary of the methodologies and surveys employed, in addition to the data collected during that time, a...

Balancing selection can maintain immunogenetic variation within host populations, but detecting its signal in a postbottlenecked population is challenging due to the potentially overriding effects of drift. Toll-like receptor genes (TLRs) play a fundamental role in vertebrate immune defence and are predicted to be under balancing selection. We prev...

In small populations, drift results in a loss of genetic variation, which reduces adaptive evolutionary potential. Furthermore, the probability of consanguineous mating increases which may result in inbreeding depression. Under certain circumstances, balancing selection can counteract drift and maintain variation at key loci. Identifying such loci...

Parasites may severely impact the fitness and life-history of their hosts. After infection, surviving individuals may suppress the growth of the parasite, or completely clear the infection and develop immunity. Consequently, parasite prevalence is predicted to decline with age. Among elderly individuals, immunosenescence may lead to a late-life inc...

Introduced populations often lose the parasites they carried in their native range, but little is known about which processes may cause parasite loss during host movement. Conservation-driven translocations could provide an opportunity to identify the mechanisms involved. Using 3,888 blood samples collected over 22 years, we investigated parasite p...

β-defensins are important components of the vertebrate innate immune system responsible for encoding a variety of anti-microbial peptides. Pathogen-mediated selection is thought to act on immune genes and potentially maintain allelic variation in the face of genetic drift. The Seychelles warbler, Acrocephalus sechellensis, is an endemic passerine t...