Abstract

Climate change could either directly or indirectly cause population declines via altered temperature, rainfall regimes, food availability or phenological responses. However few studies have focused on allocation trade-offs between growth and reproduction under marginal resources, such as food scarce that may be caused by climate warming. Such critical changes may have an unpredicted impact on amphibian life-history parameters and even population dynamics. Here, we report an allocation strategy of adult anuran individuals involving a reproductive stage under experimental warming. Using outdoor mesocosm experiments we simulated a warming scenario likely to occur at the end of this century. We examined the effects of temperature (ambient vs. pre-/post-hibernation warming) and food availability (normal vs. low) on reproduction and growth parameters of pond frogs (Pelophylax nigromaculatus). We found that temperature was the major factor influencing reproductive time of female pond frogs, which showed a significant advancing under post-hibernation warming treatment. While feeding rate was the major factor influencing reproductive status of females, clutch size, and variation of body size for females, showed significant positive correlations between feeding rate and reproductive status, clutch size, or variation of body size. Our results suggested that reproduction and body size of amphibians might be modulated by climate warming or food availability variation. We believe this study provides some new evidence on allocation strategies suggesting that amphibians could adjust their reproductive output to cope with climate warming.

Highlights

  • Climate change is predicted to play a crucial role in population declines and loss of diversity (Thomas et al, 2004)

  • Our study addressed the following questions: (1) whether there existed changes in reproductive parameters under these simulated scenarios of climate warming, (2) whether there existed a trade-off in allocating limited food for growth or reproduction on females, and (3) whether the allocation strategies were affected by temperature or feeding rate

  • We examined the differences in reproductive status of individuals in these treatments using binary logistic regression model with temperature, feeding rate, temperature × feeding rate, and initial body size as covariates

Read more

Summary

Introduction

Climate change is predicted to play a crucial role in population declines and loss of diversity (Thomas et al, 2004). The responses of reproductive traits in many animals have attracted more global attention in recent research. Several examples included the mis-timing in reproduction under climate. How to cite this article Gao et al (2015), Allocation trade-off under climate warming in experimental amphibian populations. With the continuing trend of global warming, there may be increasing unpredictable impacts on amphibian fitness (Gouveia et al, 2013; Visser, 2013)

Methods
Results
Conclusion
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call