Tabitha Rudin-Bitterli

Tabitha Rudin is a PhD student at The University of Western Australia where she is investigating whether terrestrial-breeding frogs can adapt to drying conditions, and whether the resilience of populations at risk can be increased via genetic translocations. Using the Crawling frog as a model species, Tabitha is currently identifying populations with the greatest levels of desiccation tolerance which could be used as source populations in future translocation efforts. The next step of her project will involve strategic cross-breeding of populations in the laboratory in order to test whether desiccation resistance in resulting hybrids can be increased using this method.