Vol. 13 No. 2 (2018)
Short Note

Body size, age and population structure of Triturus carnifex (Urodela: Salamandridae) in the context of facultative paedomorphosis

Giacomo Bruni
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Boulevard de la Plaine 2, 1050 Ixelles, Bruxelles, Belgium
Giulia Tessa
Dipartimento di Scienze della Vita e Biologia dei Sistemi, Università degli Studi di Torino, via Accademia Albertina 13, 10123 Torino TO, Italy
Claudio Angelini
Via Guglielmo Marconi, 30, 04018 Sezze, Italy

Published 2018-12-31

How to Cite

Bruni, G., Tessa, G., & Angelini, C. (2018). Body size, age and population structure of Triturus carnifex (Urodela: Salamandridae) in the context of facultative paedomorphosis. Acta Herpetologica, 13(2), 177–183. https://doi.org/10.13128/Acta_Herpetol-21972

Abstract

Facultative paedomorphosis occurs rarely in the genus Triturus compared to other European newts such as Ichthyosaura alpestris and Lissotriton spp., with most of observation related to single or few individuals per site. In this paper we report about body size, age and population size of two populations of Triturus carnifex with paedomorphs. Since one of the populations consisted of approximately 25% of paedomorphs, this is the first study about a population of large-bodied newts with a conspicuous number of paedomorphic individuals. We found evidences for an ecological causation of paedomorphosis, as well as further support for two recent findings about paedomorphosis: the reduction of sexual size dimorphism and the female-biased sex-ratio within paedomorphs.

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