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Ecology: global warming and amphibian losses.

Alford RA, Bradfield KS, Richards SJ

School of Marine and Tropical Biology, James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland 4811, Australia. ross.alford@jcu.edu.au

Is global warming contributing to amphibian declines and extinctions by promoting outbreaks of the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis? Analysing patterns from the American tropics, Pounds et al. envisage a process in which a single warm year triggers die-offs in a particular area (for instance, 1987 in the case of Monteverde, Costa Rica). However, we show here that populations of two frog species in the Australian tropics experienced increasing developmental instability, which is evidence of stress, at least two years before they showed chytrid-related declines. Because the working model of Pounds et al. is incomplete, their test of the climate-linked epidemic hypothesis could be inconclusive.

Published 31 May 2007 in Nature, 447(7144): E3-4; discussion E5-6.
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