The Western Balkans hosts the richest subterranean aquatic gastropod fauna in the world. The main factors shaping intraspecies diversity are thought to be isolation and endemism. In the genus Belgrandiella , minute snails inhabiting subterranean waters and springs in Central Europe and Balkans, molecular studies have shown much fewer valid species than previously anticipated. The present study applies mitochondrial cytochrome...

The subterranean aquatic snails may serve as a model of endemism and isolation vs. migration in subterranean habitats. The aim of the present paper is to verify the hypothesis that subterranean aquatic snails can migrate through diverse subterranean habitats, applying four molecular markers as well as a RAPD technique and shell morphometry. They were used to estimate the differences and gene flow between populations of the hyd...

Exact location and number of glacial refugia still remain unclear for many European cold‐blooded terrestrial vertebrates. We performed a fine‐scaled multilocus phylogeographic analysis of two Bombina species combining mitochondrial variation of 950 toads from 385 sites and nuclear genes ( Rag‐1, Ncx‐1 ) from a subset of samples to reconstruct their colonization and contemporary variation patterns. We identified the lowlands no...

The fire‐bellied toads Bombina bombina and Bombina variegata, interbreed in a long, narrow zone maintained by a balance between selection and dispersal. Hybridization takes place between local, genetically differentiated groups. To quantify divergence between these groups and reconstruct their history and demography, we analysed nucleotide variation at the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene (1096 bp) in 364 individuals from 156 s...