Fighting an uphill battle: the recovery of frogs in Australia's Wet Tropics

Title
Fighting an uphill battle: the recovery of frogs in Australia's Wet Tropics
Publication Date
2017-12
Author(s)
McKnight, Donald T
Alford, Ross A
Hoskin, Conrad J
Schwarzkopf, Lin
Greenspan, Sasha E
Zenger, Kyall R
Bower, Deborah S
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0188-3290
Email: dbower3@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:dbower3
Type of document
Journal Article
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
John Wiley & Sons, Inc
Place of publication
United States of America
DOI
10.1002/ecy.2019
UNE publication id
une:1959.11/26885
Abstract
In the 1980s and early 1990s, an outbreak of the fungal disease chytridiomycosis caused multiple species of frog to decline or disappear throughout the Wet Tropics of northern Queensland, Australia (Richards et al. 1993, McDonald and Alford 1999). This disease is caused by the pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd; Berger et al. 1998), which does not grow well at warm temperatures (Piotrowski et al. 2004). As a result, the declines often followed elevational gradients, with the most severe declines occurring at cool, high-elevation sites. For example, populations of the waterfall frog (Litoria nannotis), common mist frog (Litoria rheocola), and Australian lace-lid frog (Litoria [Nyctimystes] dayi) disappeared above 300-400 m, but these species did not decline noticeably in the lowlands (Richards et al. 1993; Laurance et al. 1996; McDonald and Alford 1999). The green-eyed tree frog (Litoria serrata; formerly L. genimaculata) also declined sharply above 300-400 m, but it did not completely disappear from those sites (Richards and Alford 2005). Although these declines and disappearances are well documented, much less attention has been given to the fact that many of the upland populations have recovered to varying degrees, even though Bd persists at a relatively high prevalence.
Link
Citation
Ecology, 98(12), p. 3221-3223
ISSN
1939-9170
0012-9658
Pubmed ID
29141097
Start page
3221
End page
3223

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