Leszek Berger

Leszek Berger (February 10, 1925 – July 8, 2012) was a Polish biologist, specialist in malacology and herpetology, discoverer of hybridogenesis in amphibians. And did of research on amphibians and reptiles in Southern Wielkopolska, a long-time employee of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Family and Education

Leszek Berger was born in Pabianice, in his mother's hometown. He spent his childhood and youth with his family, first in Lewkowiec near Ostrów Wielkopolski and in Ostrów itself. He began his education in a four-grade primary school in the neighboring village of Franklinów. After completing the third grade, his parents enrolled him in the seven-grade Ewaryst Estkowski Primary School in Ostrów Wielkopolski. In 1947, Berger graduated from the then Male High School in Ostrów Wielkopolski.

Career

Throughout his research career, Berger took extensive notes on all of the innumerable crosses that he made among water frogs. This, together with his sharp eye for details of frogs as living organisms, enabled him to make striking discoveries about the evolutionary biology of water frogs before the advent of molecular evolution and with minimal statistical training.

As a result of numerous crosses and backcrosses involving the species around Poznan, he demonstrated that the edible frog Pelophylax esculentus was not a distinct Mendelian species but rather an interspecies hybrid between the pool frog P. lessonae and the marsh frog P. ridibundus; and that P. esculentus persists through backcrosses with one of the parental species, P. lessonae (Berger 1964, 1967, 1968).