Epidemic disease decimates amphibian abundance, species diversity, and evolutionary history in the highlands of central Panama
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Amphibian populations around the world are experiencing unprecedented declines attributed to a chytrid fungal pathogen, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis . Despite the severity of the crisis, quantitative analyses of the effects of the epidemic on amphibian abundance and diversity have been unavailable as a result of the lack of equivalent data collected before and following disease outbreak. We present a community-level assessment combining long-term field surveys and DNA barcode data describing changes in abundance and evolutionary diversity within the amphibian community of El Copé, Panama, following a disease epidemic and mass-mortality event. The epidemic reduced taxonomic, lineage, and phylogenetic diversity similarly. We discovered that 30 species were lost, including five undescribed species, representing 41% of total amphibian lineage diversity in El Copé. These extirpations represented 33% of the evolutionary history of amphibians within the community, and variation in the degree of population loss and decline among species was random with respect to the community phylogeny. Our approach provides a fast, economical, and informative analysis of loss in a community whether measured by species or phylogenetic diversity.
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Ongoing losses of anuran biodiversity on Puerto Rico and other West Indian islands are part of a global amphibian decline that has continued largely unabated since at least the 1970s.
“The ongoing losses of anuran biodiversity on Puerto Rico and other West Indian islands (66, 67) are part of a global amphibian decline that has continued largely unabated since at least the 1970s (68–72).”
From Climate-driven declines in arthropod abundance restructure a rainforest food web (2018) · cites this paper as [71]
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Self-citation
- Authors
- Crawford, A. J., Lips, K. R., & Bermingham, E.
- Affiliations
- Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (PA)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2010-07-19
- Volume
- 107
- Issue
- 31
- Pages
- 13777-13782
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC2922291
- OpenAlex
- W2039114788
- Cited by
- 364
- References
- 66
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 18 · 2022: 15 · 2021: 21 · 2020: 25 · 2019: 23 · 2018: 21 · 2017: 24 · 2016: 41 · 2015: 24 · 2014: 28 · 2013: 29 · 2012: 37
- FWCI
- 26.70
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (0130273, 0213851, 9996355, 0234386)
- Smithsonian Institution
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Amphibian and Reptile Biology
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics › Bat Biology and Ecology Studies
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Freshwater macroinvertebrate diversity and ecology
- Keywords
- chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, amphibian decline, phylogenetic diversity, lineage diversity, species extirpation, mass mortality, DNA barcoding, epidemics, community phylogeny
- MeSH terms
- Altitude, Amphibians, Animals, Communicable Diseases, Genetics, Population, Chytridiomycota, Molecular Sequence Data, Panama, Phylogeny, Endangered Species
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