LSU researchers Jeremy M. Brown and Eric N. Rittmeyer,in collaboration with colleagues at Florida State University, are shedding light on how often and where species hybridize through time, and thanks to the rediscovery of 40-year-old tissue samples preserved at the LSU Museum of Natural Science,or LSUMNS. In a recent study published in Ecology and Evolution, they explain that two species of chorus frogs now form hybrids across a much wider area of Louisiana and Mississippi than they did just 30-40 years earlier. A widening area of hybridization has well-known implications for the future of these species and suggests that recent alterations to their environment acquire affected their fitness or dispersal ability.
Source: phys.org