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Salamaders and climate change
-impending extinctions?
By the now the
evidence of a global frog decline, perhaps even an extinction
crisis, has been well documented. But what about salamanders? They
are normally less abundant and less-studied compared to frogs, but
is there evidence of the same general pattern of declining
population sizes? According to Sean Rovito and colleagues, the
answer is unfortunately yes. They repeated a plethodontid
(lungless) salamander survey done in the 1970’s in Central America
and found that many species have declined. In fact they failed to
find a couple of previously very abundant species. They also found
that species declines were phylogenetically non-random and so these
declines may result in the loss of whole clades of species, meaning
that the evolutionary history of these salamanders is at
risk.
The authors attempted to
determine the cause of these declines and found that neither
habitat loss or the chytridiomycosis fungal disease implicated in
other declines explained these salamander declines. The authors
hypothesize that these declines are a direct result of climate
change –namely changing temperature and humidity. If so, we may be
witnessing some of the first extinctions that are directly caused
by climate change.
S. M. Rovito, G. Parra-Olea, C. R. Vasquez-Almazan, T. J.
Papenfuss, D. B. Wake (2009). Dramatic declines in neotropical
salamander populations are an important part of the global
amphibian crisis Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences, 106 (9), 3231-3236 DOI:
10.1073/pnas.0813051106
Posted by Marc Cadotte
That's not very surprising given the current situation we are
in....