Besides several exceptions, asexual metazoans are usually viewed as ephemeral sinks for genomes, which become ‘frozen’ in clonal lineages after their emergence from ancestral sexual species. Here, we investigated whether and at what rate the asexuals are able to introgress their genomes back into the parental sexual population, thus more or less importantly affecting the gene pools of sexual species. We focused on hybridogenetic hybrids of western Palaearctic water frogs (Pelophylax esculentus), which originate through...

The scarcity of parthenogenetic vertebrates is often attributed to their ‘inferior’ mode of clonal reproduction, which restricts them to self-reproduce their own genotype lineage and leaves little evolutionary potential with regard to speciation and evolution of sexual reproduction. Here, we show that for some taxa such uniformity does not hold. By using hybridogenetic water frogs (Pelophylax esculentus) as a model system, we demonstrate that triploid hybrid males from two geographic regions exhibit very different reproductive...

Incomplete knowledge of biodiversity remains a stumbling block for conservation planning, and even occurs within globally important Biodiversity Hotspots. Although technical advances have boosted the power of molecular biodiversity assessments, the link between DNA sequences and species and the analytics to discriminate entities, remain crucial. Here, we present an analysis of the first DNA barcode library for the freshwater fish fauna of the Mediterranean Biodiversity Hotspot (526 spp.), with virtually complete species coverage (498 spp.,...