Ph.D. Exit Seminar Ecological impacts of amphibian declines on Sierra Nevada lake communities Thomas Smith Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology University of California, Santa Barbara Friday, January 16, 2015 3:00 pm MSRB Auditorium Advisor: Cherie Briggs Ecological consequences of extinctions remain difficult to predict. Increasingly frequent species declines highlight the urgency of this issue, but they also provide opportunities for discovering how communities respond to single-species local extinctions. Mountain yellow-legged frogs (Rana muscosa and Rana sierrae) of California’s Sierra Nevada hover on the brink of extinction in the wake of widespread local extinctions caused by introduced predators (trout) and emerging infectious disease (the lethal amphibian chytrid fungus). I will present data showing that benthic producers and benthic macroinvertebrates respond relatively weakly to the absence or extinction of frogs and tadpoles. In mesocosm experiments, field experiments, and landscape-scale observations spanning weeks to years, I rarely found that variation in abundance, diversity, or community composition of producers and benthic macroinvertebrates was well explained by variation in presence-absence or density of frogs and tadpoles. These results highlight how some extinctions are likely to have relatively small effects on communities.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 17:19:48 +0000
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