Bibliography of studies on hybrid zones of the common shrew chromosome races distributed in Russia

Abstract. The common shrew, Sorex araneus Linnaeus, 1758, has become a model species for cytogenetic and evolutionary studies after discovery of extraordinary Robertsonian polymorphism at the within-species level. Development of differential staining techniques (Q-, R-and G-banding) made it possible to identify the chromosomal arms and their combination in racial karyotypes. Entering into contact with each other, the chromosomal races might form hybrid zones which represent a great interest for understanding of the process of speciation. Until recently all known hybrid zones of S. araneus were localized in Western Europe and only one was identified in Siberia (Russia) between Novosibirsk and Tomsk races (Aniskin and Lukianova 1989, Searle and Wójcik 1998, Polyakov et al. 2011). However, a rapidly growing number of reports on discovery of interracial hybrid zones of Sorex araneus in the European part of Russia and neighboring territories appeared lately. The aim of the present work is to compile the bibliography of all studies covering this topic regardless of the original language and the publishing source which hopefully could make research data more accessible to international scientists. It could also be a productive way to save current history of Sorex araneus researches in full context of the ISACC (International Sorex araneus Cytogenetics Committee) heritage (Searle et al. 2007, Zima 2008).