Josefa Celsa Señaris


Josefa Celsa Señaris is a Venezuelan herpetologist. She has published information about frogs and she has identified new genera and species. Señaris is the director of the La Salle Foundation's Natural History Museum in Caracas.

Life

Señaris was born in 1965 and she obtained a degree in biology at the Central University of Venezuela and her doctorate in 2001 at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
She is interested in the fauna of Venezuela, in particular the Guayana Region where table-top mountains called tepuis provide habitats for endemic plant and animal species: some amphibians are known only from a single tepuy. From a geological point of view, the tepuis have been isolated for approximately 120 million years, and it has been suggested that the tepuy habitats are a "lost world" that could support relictual populations. However, Señaris's work suggests that in a zoological context tepuis are not as isolated as originally believed, and that some of their species are neoendemics rather than paleoendemics. For example, an endemic group of tree frogs, Tepuihyla, have diverged after the tepuis were formed, that is, speciation followed colonization from the lowlands.
Señaris became the director in 2004 of the La Salle Foundation's Natural History Museum in Caracas.
Señaris has erected two genera and described several species new to science. In many cases Señaris collaborated with two other herpetologists, José Ayarzagüena and Stefan Gorzula.

Honours

Eponyms

In recognition of her "contributions to the knowledge of centrolenid diversity and morphology" she has had a genus of glass frog, Celsiella, named after her nickname which is Celsi.

Legacy

She has described a number of taxa, in particular amphibians but also a few reptiles.

Genera

— Oreophrynella nigra — has been observed to roll itself into a ball and to throw itself down inclines to avoid tarantula spiders.