Биологија острвских популација лацертидних гуштера

Abstract

The island habitats have for a long time been recognized as places where processes of speciation under the influences of specific living conditions and isolation can be observed. The large part of Milutin Radovanović’s research was focused on the island populations of morphologically and ecologically similar species, Dalmatian wall lizard and Italian wall lizard. During his long-standing work, Milutin Radovanović systematised the existing knowledge base on these animals, resolved taxonomic status of certain island forms and described a number of subspecies based on morphological characters. He intensively studied the phenomena of morphological variability, island melanism, dwarf and giant island forms, switch to herbivory diet, competitive exclusion and passive anthropogenic dispersal of the lizards among islands. Based on his results, he gave assumptions on means and directions of colonization of the Eastern Adriatic coast by these two lizard species and rapid evolution which took place on the geologically relatively young Adriatic islands. Although new molecular studies question validity of many subspecies, based on the relatively small genetic distance, one of the Radovanović’s most important assumptions – the one about rapid morphological evolution of the island forms, has been completely confirmed by later experimental studies.