Adaptive Strategies of Ambystoma tigrinum Green Inhabiting the Llano Estacado of West Texas

THE IMPLICATIONS OF OVUM SIZE VARIABILITY FOR OFFSPRING FITNESS AND CLUTCH SIZE WITHIN SEVERAL POPULATIONS OF SALAMANDERS (AMBYSTOMA)

“…The trade-off between egg size and egg number which has been demonstrated for some of these animals (Kaplan and Salthe, 1979), and the large amount of variability that exists in the size of eggs and offspring that are produced, tend to suggest that successful reproduction can be accomplished in a variety of ways within the same population. This is especially true if the environment is dynamic (e.g., Rose and Armentrout, 1976), perhaps fluctuating between one in which the population is regulated by various density-dependent factors and one in which density-independent factors predominate.…”

Interactions Between Growing Predators and Growing Prey

“…Cannibalism could be viewed as another aspect of the developmental response in which size differences determine the rate of predation. Such a switch in intraspecific interactions from competition to predation (cannibalism) is well documented in some species of insects (Fox 1975;Mordoch and Sih 1978), scorpions (Polis 1980), fish (LeCren et al 1977;Loadmon et al 1986;Persson 1983;Werner 1986), frogs (Bragg 1964), and salamanders (Rose and Armentrout 1976). Cannibalism could have a positive effect on a population if the individuals that benefit have a sufficient gain that more than compensates for the loss of individuals as modeled above.…”

“…This mutual mutilation could itself be a result of an aggressive form of interference competition (Polis this Vol.}. Such a relationship occurs in salamanders competing for small arthropods with the ever-present risk that a larger salamander may eat a smaller member of its own or another species (Hairston 1986;Holomuzki 1986;Rose and Armentrout 1976;Stenhouse 1985;Stenhouse et al 1983;Wilbur 1972). Changes in trophic relationships are likely to be important in many aquatic communities in which larval insects, fish, and amphibians are dominant predators.…”

A Comprehensive Expressed Sequence Tag Linkage Map for Tiger Salamander and Mexican Axolotl: Enabling Gene Mapping and Comparative Genomics in Ambystoma

“…The complex as a whole is an important, naturalistic model system because taxa are characterized by extensive interspecific and intraspecific variation for a number of ecologically important traits, including expression of metamorphic vs. nonmetamorphic (paedomorphic) life histories (Gould 1977;Shaffer and Voss 1996), timing of metamorphosis (Rose and Armentrout 1976;Voss and Smith 2005), cannibal vs. normal larval morphologies (Powers 1907;Hoffman and Pfennig 1999), infectious disease (Collins et al 2004), variation in adult coloration and pigment patterning (Reese 1969;Parichy 1996Parichy , 1998, and variation in general morphology (Shaffer 1984;Irschick and Shaffer 1997). In addition, these salamanders are important laboratory models for olfaction (Marchand et al 2004;Park et al 2004), vision (Thoreson et al 2004;Chichilnisky and Reike 2005), cardiogenesis (Denz et al 2004;Zhang et al 2004), embryogenesis (Bachvarova et al 2004;Ericsson et al 2004), and postembryonic development (Parichy 1998;Voss and Smith 2005), including organ and tissue regeneration (Christensen et al 2002;Schnapp and Tanaka 2005).…”