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Infectious diseases (IDs) are a de rigueur issue in amphibian conservation biology. The precipitous declines of Neotropical, Australian, and Californian amphibians due to chytridiomycosis (Berger et a1. 1998; Lips et al. 2006, 2008; Vredenburg et al. 2010; Cheng et al. 2011) undoubtedly launched amphibian parasites onto the global stage, aided by a cast of viral, platyhelminth, protist, and other fungal infectious agents (Cunningham et a1. 1996; Johnson et a1. 1999; Green et al. 2002; Brunner et al. 2004; Raffel et al. 2008; Rohr et al. 2008b; Teacher et al. 2010). As a result, amphibian ID research has increased dramatically, with few tangible outputs relevant for applied conservation (Woodhams et al. 2011; but see Johnson et al. 2007), perhaps unsurprisingly, as characterizing the dynamics of disease and controlling IDs are thorny issues. When warranted, mitigating the effects of amphibian IDs will arguably be more complicated than in other terrestrial vertebrate hosts, due to cryptic hosts with complex life histories, large population sizes of hosts, and generalist parasites affecting speciose host communities (Lips et al. 2006, 2008; Johnson et al. 2008; Woodhams et al. 2011; Garner et al. 2012). Nevertheless, amphibians are declining at an alarming rate (Houlahan et al. 2000; McCallum 2007) and amphibian parasites are contributing factors in many of these declines (Skerratt et al. 2007; Crawford et al. 2010). We are obliged to respond to this threat, as human activities are factors in many novel amphibian host/parasite dynamics (Forson and Storfer 2006; Bosch et al. 2007; Fisher and Garner 2007; Picco and Collins 2008; Rohr et al. 2008b; St. Amour et al. 2008; Walker et al. 2008; Schloegel et al. 2009). |
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