Frog body size responses to precipitation shift from resource-driven to desiccation-resistant as temperatures warm.

Abstract

Climate change threatens biodiversity in a range of ways, including changing animal body sizes. Despite numerous examples of size declines related to increasing temperatures, patterns of size change are not universal, suggesting that one or more primary mechanisms impacting size change are unknown. Precipitation is likely to influence the size different from and in conjunction with changes in temperature, yet tests of the interaction between these variables are rare. In this study, we show that a crossover interaction between temperature and precipitation impacts the body size of frogs as the climate warms. Using more than 3000 museum frog specimens from Borneo and climate records spanning more than 100 years, we found that frogs are larger in wet conditions than in dry conditions at cool temperatures, suggesting that resource availability determines body size at colder temperature. Conversely, frogs are larger in dry conditions than in wet conditions at warm temperatures, resulting in a crossover to desiccation resistance as the main determinant of body size as climates warm. Our results demonstrate that global warming can alter the impact of precipitation on life-history traits. We suggest that increased attention be paid to such interactive effects of climate variables, to identify complex mechanisms driving climate-induced size changes.