Many island archipelagos sit on shallow continental shelves, and during the Pleistocene, these islands were often connected as global sea levels dropped following glaciation. Given a continental shelf only 30–60 m below sea level, the terrestrial biota of the Seychelles Archipelago likely dispersed amongst now isolated islands during the Pleistocene. Hypogeophis rostratus is an egg‐laying, direct‐developing caecilian amphibian...

New Guinea and surrounding islands are home to some of the richest assemblages of insular biodiversity in the world. The key geological drivers of species richness in this region are largely considered to be mountain uplift and development of offshore archipelagos—some of which have accreted onto New Guinea—with the role of mountain uplift and elevational gradients receiving more attention than the role of isolation on islands...

In species‐rich tropical forests, effective biodiversity management demands measures of progress, yet budgetary limitations typically constrain capacity of decision makers to assess response of biological communities to habitat change. One approach is to identify ecological‐disturbance indicator species (EDIS) whose monitoring is also monetarily cost‐effective. These species can be identified by determining individual species’...

Anonymous nuclear markers were developed for Seychelles caecilian amphibians. Using a previously published bioinformatics pipeline (developed for Roche 454 data), 36 candidate anonymous nuclear loci (ANL) of at least 180 bp length were identified from Illumina MiSeq next generation sequencing data for five Seychelles species. We designed primer pairs for the 36 candidate ANL and tested these by PCR and Sanger sequencing. Seven...