Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Commons^™

Disease Monitoring And Biosecurity, David E. Green, Matthew J. Gray, Debra L. Miller

UT Extension publication

Understanding and detecting diseases of amphibians has become vitally important in conservation and ecological studies in the twenty-fi rst century. Disease is defi ned as the deviance from normal conditions in an organism. The etiologies (causes) of disease include infectious, toxic, traumatic, metabolic, and neoplastic agents. Thus, monitoring disease in nature can be complex. For amphibians, infectious, parasitic, and toxic etiologies have gained the most notoriety. Amphibian diseases have been linked to declining amphibian populations, are a constant threat to endangered species, and are frequently a hazard in captive breeding programs, translocations, and repatriations. For example, a group of viruses …