Warming increases activity in the common tropical frog Eleutherodactylus coqui
Date
12/2021Keywords
Metadata
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Abstract
Tropical ecosystems are expected to experience climate warming, with predicted increases in drying and heat extremes in the coming years. Understanding how these changes will affect terrestrial vertebrates such as amphibians is limited. The Tropical Responses to Altered Climate Experiment (TRACE) in the Luquillo Experimental Forest in northeastern Puerto Rico allows us to study how the tropical forest responds to warming within a replicated plot design. From September 2018 to August 2019, we used mark-recapture sampling to investigate how the spatial population ecology of the common coqui frog (Eleutherodactylus coqui) is impacted by experimentally increasing surface temperatures by 4°C above ambient. We compared estimates of baseline detection, space use, and the density of frogs in control and warmed plots. Coqui space use and population density did not differ between control and warmed plots. However, coqui detection probabilities were higher in warmed plots, suggesting an increased level of activity relative to individuals in the control (unwarmed) plots. Frog detection increased in all plots with increased precipitation. Our results suggest that, at least in the short-term, the density of an ecological generalist frog like E. coqui does not change as a response to increased surface temperatures. However, short-term responses to warming such as changes in behavior may lead to changes in population dynamics in the long-term. Our research highlights the need to consider mutiple repsonses in order to understand the effects of climate warming on tropical vertebrates.
Citation
Matlaga , T J H , Burrowes , P A , Hernández-Pacheco , R , Pena , J , Sutherland , C & Wood , T E 2021 , ' Warming increases activity in the common tropical frog Eleutherodactylus coqui ' , Climate Change Ecology , vol. 2 , 100041 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecochg.2021.100041
Publication
Climate Change Ecology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2666-9005Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Description
We would like to thank several funding sources including the Department of Biology at Susquehanna University, the National Science Foundation (IOS-2011281) to P.A. Burrowes, as well as the U.S. Department of Energy (award number 89243018S-SC-000014) and NSF award (DEB-1754713). The USDA Forest Service's International Institute of Tropical Forestry (IITF) and University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras provided additional support.Collections
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