SquaMates Ep. 1: The Fishopod Menace

A totally serious herpetological podcast

SquaMates Ep. 1: The Fishopod Menace

It’s finally here! The first episode of SquaMates, the totally serious herpetology podcast, hosted by Mark D. Scherz, Gabriel Ugueto, and Ethan Kocak!

In this first episode, we introduce you to the show and its format, then cover all of herpetological history, and then discuss all reptiles and amphibians ever.

Show References:

Caruso, N. & Rabaiotti, D. (2018) Does it fart? The definitive field guide to animal flatulence. Quercus, 144 pp.

Cope, E.D. (1895) The classification of the Ophidia. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 18, 186–219.

Duellman, W.E. & Trueb, L. (1986) Biology of Amphibians. John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

Feng, Y.-J., Blackburn, D.C., Liang, D., Hillis, D.M., Wake, D.B., Cannatella, D.C. & Zhang, P. (2017) Phylogenomics reveals rapid, simultaneous diversification of three major clades of Gondwanan frogs at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary. Proceedings of the national Academy of Sciences of the USA, 114, E5864–E5870. 10.1073/pnas.1704632114

Irisarri, I., Baurain, D., Brinkmann, H., Delsuc, F., Sire, J.-Y., Kupfer, A., Petersen, J., Jarek, M., Meyer, A., Vences, M. & Philippe, H. (2017) Phylotranscriptomic consolidation of the jawed vertebrate timetree. Nature Ecology and Evolution, 1, 13709–1378. 10.1038/s41559-017-0240-5

Trueb, L. (1968) Cranial Osteology of the Hylid Frog, Smilisca baudini. University of Kansas Publications, Museum of Natural History, 18, 11–35.

Trueb, L. (1973) Bones, frogs, and evolution. In: Vial, J.L. (Ed.) Evolutionary biology of the anurans: Contemporary research on major problems. University of Missouri Press, USA, pp. 65–132.

Trueb, L. (1993) Patterns of Diversity in the Lissamphibian Skull. In: Hanken, J. & Hall, B.K. (Eds.) The Skull, Volume 2: Patterns of Structural and Systematic Diversity. University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL, USA, pp. 255–343.

Wollenberg Valero, K.C., Garcia-Porta, J., Rodríguez, A., Arias, M., Shah, A., Randrianiaina, R.D., Brown, J.L., Glaw, F., Amat, F., Künzel, S., Metzler, D., Isokpehi, R.D. & Vences, M. (2017) Transcriptomic and macroevolutionary evidence for phenotypic uncoupling between frog life history phases. Nature Communications, 8, 15213. 10.1038/ncomms15213

Yan, F., Lü, J., Zhang, B., Yuan, Z., Wei, G., Mi, X., Zou, D., Xu, W., Chen, S., Wang, J., Xie, F., Wu, M., Xiao, H., Liang, Z., Jin, J., Wu, S., Xu, C., Tapley, B., Turvey, S.T., Papenfuss, T.J., Cunningham, A.A., Murphy, R.W., Zhang, Y. & Che, J. (2018) The Chinese giant salamander exemplifies the hidden extinction of cryptic species. Current Biology, 28, R590–R592. 10.1016/j.cub.2018.04.004

4 Responses

  1. Graham Peter King says:

    So these Fishopods.. first they squam, then they squampered? Then some descendants squlambered up into the trees, and a few later took to the squavannah, eventually developing a squivilization..

  2. llewelly says:

    I was listening to episode 1 for about the (n^2)th time, and I realized I wasn’t entirely clear on the distinction between a call, and other noises an animal might make.

    For example, in episode 1, Gabriel says “… geckos are the only squamates that actually call …” This is about 79% of the way through, right after Ethan mentions that gecko and tokay are onomatopoeia.

    I thought of the noises king cobras make during threat display, and I thought, what, exactly, is meant by a call?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I accept the Privacy Policy

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.