By Herp News
Amphibians occupy almost every ecological niche, from the highest tropical trees to the most fetid pools of desert water. Brightly colored and cryptically camouflaged, they have evolved an astounding array of defenses – about half of all amphibians are poisonous. But despite their adaptability, these animals are in serious trouble, all over the world. And now, it seems, their best defense may be their biggest weakness. According to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, poisonous amphibians may be more likely to go extinct than their benign counterparts. These results surprised study authors Kevin Arbuckle and Michael Speed of the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. They designed their study to test a hypothesis in evolution, called escape-and-radiate. Scientists first used this to describe competition between poisonous plants and the caterpillars that eat them. It holds that natural selection favors adaptations that help prey escape predators, because those traits will be passed down to future generations. At the same time, any traits that help predators catch their prey will be passed down, too. “It’s been described as an evolutionary arms race, and rightly so,” Arbuckle told Mongabay. The toxic Panamanian Golden Frog has gone extinct in the wild. Photo by Rhett A. Butler According to Arbuckle, few studies had actually tested this hypothesis in animals. Amphibians, with their diverse defenses against predators and their well-studied fossil record, seemed to be the perfect natural laboratory. “Plus,” Arbuckle added, “they’re exceptionally cool.”…
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Read more here: herpetofauna.com
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