Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Commons^™

Behavioral Thermoregulation And Thermal Mismatches Influence Disease Dynamics In Amphibians, Erin Louise Sauer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Amphibians are currently the most threatened vertebra taxa on the planet. Hundreds of species are thought to have gone extinct while thousands more have been listed as threatened or endangered over the past few decades. Habitat loss, invasive species, climate change, and disease are all thought to have partially contributed to these declines. Two pathogens in particular, infectious viruses in the genus Ranavirus (simply referred to as ranavirus) and the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), have been associated with global mass mortality events of amphibians. Virulent pathogens such as these tend to impose strong selective pressures on their hosts driving the …

Climate Change Drives Outbreaks Of Emerging Infectious Disease And Phenological Shifts, Jeremy Cohen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Climate change is expected to impact species by altering infectious disease outcomes, modifying community composition, and causing species to shift their phenology, body sizes and range distributions. However, the outcomes of these impacts are often controversial; for example, scientists have debated whether climate change will exacerbate emerging infectious disease and which species are at greatest risk to advance their phenology. There reason for these controversies may be that climate change is impacting diverse processes across a wide range of ecological scales, as the interplay between fine-scale processes and broad-scale dynamics can often cause unpredictable changes to the biosphere. Therefore, it …

Understanding Amphibian Decline: The Role Of Pesticides And The Pathogenic Chytrid Fungus On Amphibians And Aquatic Communities, Taegan A. Mcmahon

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Amphibians are the most threatened taxon on the planet. Declines have been associated with over-exploitation, habitat loss, pollution, and pathogenic diseases, but of these factors, pollution and disease have been relatively under-studied. Here, I investigated: 1) the impacts of commonly used pesticides on aquatic communities, 2) the effect of these pesticides on amphibian susceptibility to the pathogenic chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), and 3) whether there are non-amphibian hosts of Bd and 4) how to best quantify the survival of Bd through ontogeny of the host.

In my first research chapter, I quantified the effects of environmentally relevant concentrations of …