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January 2000 - July 2001
Publications
Publications (47)
Macroevolutionary changes such as variation in habitat use or diet are often associated with convergent, adaptive changes in morphology. However, it is still unclear how small-scale morphological variation at the population level can drive shifts in ecology such as observed at a macroevolutionary scale. Here, we address this question by investigati...
Diet has been suggested to be an important driver of variation in microbiota composition in mammals. However, whether this is a more general phenomenon and how fast changes in gut microbiota occur with changes in diet remains poorly understood. Forty-nine years ago, ten lizards of the species Podarcis siculus were taken from the island of Pod Kopiš...
Phenotypic traits have been shown to evolve in response to variation in the environment. However, the evolutionary processes underlying the emergence of phenotypic diversity can typically only be understood at the population level. Consequently, how subtle phenotypic differences at the intraspecific level can give rise to larger‐scale changes in pe...
Bite force is a key performance trait in lizards because biting is involved in many ecologically relevant tasks, including foraging, fighting and mating. Several factors have been suggested to impact bite force in lizards, such as head morphology (proximate factors), or diet, intraspecific competition and habitat characteristics (ultimate factors)....
Bite force is a key performance trait in lizards because biting is involved in many ecologically relevant tasks, including foraging, fighting and mating. Several factors have been suggested to impact bite force in lizards, such as head morphology (proximate factors), or diet, intraspecific competition and habitat characteristics (ultimate factors)....
Natural dietary shifts offer the opportunity to address the nutritional physiological characters required to thrive on a particular diet. Here, we studied the nutritional physiology of Podarcis siculus, with populations on Pod Mrčaru, Croatia, that have become omnivorous and morphologically distinct (including the development of valves in the hindg...
The European glass lizard, Pseudopus apodus (Pallas, 1775), is a large, legless lizard with
wide distribution across south-eastern Europe and eastern and central Asia. To date,
morphological diversification among populations on a geographically small scale has not yet been reported in this lizard. Thus, we investigated the morphological variations...
Abstract Access to resources is a dynamic and multicausal process that determines the success and survival of a population. It is therefore often challenging to disentangle the factors affecting ecological traits like diet. Insular habitats provide a good opportunity to study how variation in diet originates, in particular in populations of mesopre...
Many animals use their excrements to communicate with others. In order to increase signal efficacy, animals often behaviourally select for specific defecation sites that maximize the detectability of their faecal deposits, such as the tip of rocks by some lizard species. However, the field conditions in which these observations are made make it dif...
The European glass lizard, Pseudopus apodus (Pallas, 1775) is a large, legless lizard that can be found both on the mainland and on many Mediterranean islands. Our research focuses on two populations of the European glass lizard from the eastern Adriatic coast, one from mainland (Klis), and one from an island (Cres). We studied morphology and scale...
Foraging decisions should reflect a balance between costs and benefits of alternative strategies. Predation risk and resource availability in the environment may be crucial in deciding how cautious individuals should behave during foraging. These costs and benefits will vary in time and context, meaning that animals should be able to adjust their f...
Supporting Information.
The study of animal personality, defined as consistent inter-individual differences in correlated behavioral traits stable throughout time and/or contexts, has recently become one of the fastest growing areas in animal biology, with study species ranging from insects to non-human primates. The latter have, however, only occasionally been tested wit...
The Nose‐horned Viper, Vipera ammodytes (Linnaeus, 1758) is the largest venomous snake in the western Balkans. However, there’s paucity of research in some aspects of its biology. Here we present the results of the first study of the biology of suburban V. ammodytes in Croatia, from 2008 till 2014, in the inactive Bizek quarry. Our goals were to de...
This was a study of reptiles and amphibians which lasted from 2008 till 2014 in the inactive Bizek quarry, where we collected information on the presence of species belonging to those two groups. A variety of habitats occur in the quarry: a mixed deciduous forest of Quercus sp., Fagus sylvatica and Carpinus betulus surrounds the quarry to the north...
Aim
Character displacement and release can occur quickly in novel environments and communities. Species introductions are ‘natural experiments’ in which evolutionary changes can be studied as community composition varies. We asked whether morphologies of the introduced small Indian mongoose ( Herpestes auropunctatus ) and the larger native stone ma...
Although laboratory measurements of whole-animal performance have become a standard tool in evolutionary biology, if and how interindividual variation in performance translates into differential fitness remains poorly understood. Particularly rare are studies that have connected performance to mating and reproductive success in the field. In this s...
Trade-offs arise when two functional traits impose conflicting demands on the same design trait. Consequently, excellence in one comes at the cost of performance in the other. One of the most widely studied performance trade-offs is the one between sprint speed and endurance. Although biochemical, physiological and (bio)mechanical correlates of eit...
Background: Hematological and biochemical analyses of blood can be of great importance for studying the biology of species and determining the health status of animals in both the wild and captivity. In order to determine baseline ranges for the nose-horned viper Vipera ammodytes, we determined the blood cell morphology and measured 20 hematologica...
European Glass Lizard (EGL) (Pseudopus apodusPallas 1775) is the largest of the family Anguidae. It is
widespread in the Balkans, the Caucasus and parts of South and Central Asia. In Croatia it inhabits the coastal area, which is the NW border of its distribution area. Since populations of a species may exhibit character displacement induced by va...
Sexual selection molds the morphology, physiology and behavior of males in many animals. At first glance, it seems reasonable to assume that females would use the same male traits and signals in mate choice as males do during male-male competition. However, intra- and intersexual competition may affect traits in the same or the opposite direction,...
Competition over spatial niche utilisation is one of most common competitive interactions between species in sympatry. Moreover, competitive interactions may involve age classes, and can fluctuate temporally. Consequently, evasive strategies that enable co-existence are likely to be important in the evolution of species assemblages. Here we investi...
We studied captive Balkan Whip Snakes (Hierophis gemonensis) to determine blood biochemical parameters that are useful indicators of physiological status during different periods of the biological cycle, including pre- and posthibernation, hibernation, sexual activity, and normal activity. In addition to classic statistical analyses, six machine-le...
Background and Purpose: Physiological field of metabolism manipulation tries to elucidate how tissues recuperate after ischemic reperfusion changes, how signal molecules coordinate metabolic pathways and what physiological changes are to be expected in induced artificial hypometabolism or suspended animation in biomedicine. Evolutionary developed m...
Physiological field of manipulating metabolism tries to elucidate how tissues recuperate after ischemic reperfusion changes, how signal-molecules coordinate metabolic pathways and what physiological changes to expect in induced artificial hypometabolism or suspended animation in biomedicine. Certain animals are adapted to oscillations in photoperio...
Body size has a pervasive effect on animal functioning and life history with size dependent changes in performance and physiology throughout ontogeny being common in many ectothermic vertebrates. However, as selection on juvenile life history stages is strong, juveniles often offset the disadvantages of small body size by disproportionate levels of...
A case of a 45-day-old male infant, bitten on the neck by nose-horned viper (Vipera ammodytes ammodytes), is reported. This episode occurred while the baby was on a picnic with his parents in a hill near a town in southern Croatia. In spite of immediate arrival at hospital, where antivenom was administrated and all the necessary treatment measures...
Over recent years, changes of erythrocytic nuclei have been increasingly used to evaluate genotoxic effects of different compounds such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (benzo-a-pyrene, naphthalene, β-naphthoflavone), heavy metals (cadmium, mercury), textile mill effluent especially in aquatic ecosystem. However, in fish, both micronuclei and er...
Permanent colour polymorphisms may be maintained by complex interactions between physiological traits (e.g. immunity) and environmental pressures. In this study we investigate morph specific variation in parasite load and cellular immune response (induced by a Phytohaemagglutinin, PHA injection) in a colour polymorphic population of the Dalmatian w...
The behaviour and housing requirements of mature boars (Sus scrofa) are poorly understood although they may be an important aspect of improving welfare and productivity. Since a defifi nition of relevant behaviours is essential to obtain quantitative information about the housing requirements of mature boars, the aim of this study was to establish...
If alternative phenotypes in polymorphic populations do not mate randomly, they can be used as model systems to study adaptive diversification and possibly the early stages of sympatric speciation. In this case, non random mating is expected to support genetic divergence among the different phenotypes. In the present study, we use population geneti...
The behaviour and housing requirements of mature boars (Sus scrofa) are poorly understood although they may be an important aspect of improving welfare and productivity. Since a definition of relevant behaviours is essential to obtain quantitative information about the housing requirements of mature boars, the aim of this study was to establish the...
Species with alternative phenotypes offer unique opportunities to investigate hormone-behavior relationships. We investigated the relationships between testosterone, corticosterone, morphology, performance, and immunity in a population of lizards (Podarcis melisellensis) which exhibits a color polymorphism. Males occur in three different color morp...
Males of the lizard Podarcis melisellensis occur in three distinct colours that differ in bite performance, with orange males biting harder than white or yellow ones. Differences in bite force among colour morphs are best explained by differences in head height, suggesting underlying variation in cranial shape and/or the size of the jaw adductors....
We describe polymerase chain reaction primers and amplification conditions for 13 highly polymorphic microsatellite DNA loci isolated from the Dalmatian wall lizard, Podarcis melisellensis. The number of alleles per locus ranged from 12 to 41, with levels of observed heterozygosity between 0.62 and 0.94. Most of these loci were successfully cross-a...
Males of a Croatian population of the lacertid lizard Podarcis melisellensis exhibit a striking polymorphism, with coloration of the throat and abdomen ranging from completely white, to yellow or orange.
In a first attempt to explore the potential ecological and evolutionary significance of this polymorphism, we compared the
three forms of males in...
The global biodiversity crisis extends to autochthonous local breeds of livestock. There is an increasing danger that these rare breeds become extinct and with them their locally adapted gene pool. Modern molecular tools such as parentage testing using microsatellite genotyping are powerful in guiding management and conservation. We tested nine mic...
Polyphenolic compounds are widely distributed in the plant kingdom and display a variety of biological activities, including chemoprevention and tumor growth inhibition. Propolis is made up of a variety of polyphenolic compounds. We compared how the routes of administration of polyphenolic compounds deriving from propolis and of propolis itself aff...
The lizard Lacerta (Zootoca) vivipara, which is viviparous in the greatest part of its distribution range, has however some oviparous populations on the southern margin of its range. The present study aimed at determining the reproductive mode and the ATA (aspartate transaminase) enzyme characteristics of four populations in Slovenia and one popula...
The malignant hyperthermia (MH) gene status in pigs on some farms in Croatia was investigated. Molecular test using polymerase chain reaction was used and 285 swine of four breeds and some crossbred pigs were tested. The obtained results showed the existence of approximately 11% of heterozygotes and about 1% of susceptible homozygotes in the breedi...
Anesthesia can induce skeletal muscle rigidity, hypermetabolism and high fever in men genetically predisposed to malignant hyperthermia; such episodes can lead to tissue damage and sudden death, if not immediately reversed. In pigs with reciprocal condition stress can induce death or lead to devalued meat products. Muscle contraction is controlled...
In order to study a possible immunomodulatory effect of the royal jelly (RJ) secreted by mandibular and hypopharingeal glands of the worker honeybee (Apis mellifera Linne.) we have used a well established rodent model. The CBA mice were given s.c. 0.1 ml of RJ, 7 days before, or immediately after, the immunization with sheep red blood cells (SRBC)....
