Hello dear guest,

My name is Anton, and I am dedicated to searching for abnormalities in amphibians around the world. These searches have taken me into the taiga's depths, filled with ticks, moose flies, and mosquitoes in the North of the Volga region and West Siberia, forcing me to stand for hours waist-deep in a body of water teeming with medical leeches, spending endless hours sorting through mollusks and placing them in small plastic containers under the scorching sun of the forest-steppe, which burned my skin to the color of boiled river crayfish. My pursuits led me to the border with Kazakhstan in Kyrgyzstan during the coronavirus pandemic, where we were forced to live in the mountains for several weeks studying the local herpetofauna. We have been searching for them on the shores of the saltiest lakes in the world, as well as the deepest ones scattered in the heart of the Altai Mountains. These searches took me to Thai frog farms, where locals found incredible multi-legged frogs, and the farm owner treated us to rice vodka. My journeys brought me to the border with Afghanistan, where locals fed us watermelons while we guarded their watermelon fields from local children, with whom we eventually became friends and learned Tajik from them.

All these travels in search of an amazing natural phenomenon capable of stirring the imagination of any science fiction writer opened up a new, incredibly interesting world, which I would like to share on the pages of this electronic source. My searches led me to uncover inspiring stories of scientists whose research forms the roots of our studies - no less breathtaking and intriguing. They dedicated a tremendous amount of time and effort in their lives to uncovering the truth and gaining a deeper understanding of this phenomenon. Their adventures, along with amusing coincidences and intersections in their lives, could serve as the foundation for an engaging novel. I take my hat off to them and wish to pay tribute by sharing their stories here.

I hope that your time spent on this website will be valuable, dear guest, and I will strive to ensure that anyone interested in this topic can find comprehensive information about it here. I am delighted to meet you and eagerly open the door to this amazing world of nature's intricate connections between trematodes and amphibians, whose million years of evolution have come together as a single puzzle that I will solve together with you.

With warmest wishes,

Anton O. Svinin
PhD, Senior Researcher
Laboratory of Chromosome Stability and Genome Microevolution
Institute of Cytology of the Russian Academy of Sciences
4 Tikhoretsky Prospekt, 194064 St. Petersburg, Russia