This is a two.year collaborative research project between Dr. Warren Burggren, University of Massachusetts, Dr. Daniel Townsend, University of Scranton and Professor Lin Yao.Sung, National Taiwan University supported by the AIT.CCNAA Cooperative Science Program. This proposal plans to study the potential role of physiology in reproductive isolation between closely related species. They plan to use brown frogs, Rana sauteri , collected from three distinct altitudes in Taiwan to examine the potential role of physiology in reproductive isolation to elucidate the relationship between speciation and reproductive isolating mechanisms. This proposal addresses an important problem in ecology and evolutionary biology. The findings can have significant implications in evolutionary theory and can advance our understanding of general mechanisms of speciation. The experimental design is simple and the species identified is uniquely appropriate to serve as an animal model for this study. Taiwan is an excellent site for this study, since this is one of the few places where brown frogs are found distributed over such a large area and at different altitudes.
