Frog Fungus Hammering Biodiversity Of Communities

It may also be true of the frogs of Central Rosetta stone
America, where the pattern of extinctions emerges clearly only at a certain spatial scale.Everyone knows that frogs are in trouble and that some species have disappeared, but a recent analysis of Central American frog surveys shows the situation is worse than had been thought.Under pressure from a fungal disease, the frogs in this biodiversity hot spot are undergoing a vast homogenization that is leaving behind impoverished communities that increasingly resemble one another.We're witnessing the McDonaldization of the frog communities, says Kevin G. Smith, Ph.D., associate director of the Tyson Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis.The analysis, of data collected over many years by Karen R. Lips, Ph.D., an associate professor of biology and director of the program in Sustainable Development and Conservation Biology at the University of Maryland and research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, was published online in the October issue of Ecology Letters.The analysis of frog data was inspired in part by earlier work by Jonathan M. Chase, Ph.D., associate professor of biology in Arts Sciences, director of the Tyson Research Center and a co-author of the paper.Chase found that when predatory fish were introduced into artificial ponds at the research center, not only did they reduce diversity Rosetta Stone Chinese
within each pond, but they also made the species composition of the ponds more similar.In the language of ecology, the predators decreased both alpha diversity, or the diversity within each site, and beta diversity, the diversity among sites. The pond study will be published in the November issue of Ecology Letters.In the new analysis, the role of the predatory fish was played by Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd, a microscopic fungus that lives in water and moist soil that sickens or kills frogs. Bd is called a chytrid fungus from the Greek chytridium, meaning little pot because small blisters filled with sperm-like, flagellated zoospores form in the skin of infected frogs.Smith thought that the pathogen might be altering the frog communities in the same way the predatory fish had altered the pond communities, causing them to lose both alpha and beta diversity.People had compared the susceptibility of different species to the fungus but no one had looked for changes in the less appreciated beta diversity.The baseline assumption of the analysis was that the pathogen was causing no change in beta diversity, the result Rosetta Stone Chinese Levev 1-3
that would be expected if it hit all species equally as it’swept across the region.Bd is an invasive species whose origin is not known.The fungus is devastating to frogs because it infects the skin, a much more important organ in amphibians than in other vertebrates.