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Forests as promoters of terrestrial life-history strategies in East African amphibians

Müller, Hendrik and Liedtke, Hans Christoph and Menegon, Michele and Beck, Jan and Ballesteros-Mejia, Liliana and Nagel, Peter and Loader, Simon Paul. (2013) Forests as promoters of terrestrial life-history strategies in East African amphibians. Biology Letters, 9 (3). p. 20121146.

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Abstract

Many amphibian lineages show terrestrialization of their reproductive strategy and breeding is partially or completely independent of water. A number of causal factors have been proposed for the evolution of terrestrialized breeding. While predation has received repeated attention as a potential factor, the influence of other factors such as habitat has never been tested using appropriate data or methods. Using a dataset that comprises 180 amphibian species from various East African habitats, we tested whether species occurring in different habitats show different patterns of terrestrialization in their breeding strategy. We recovered a significant association between terrestrialized breeding strategies and forest habitats. In general, forest seems to act as a facilitator, providing a permissive environment for the evolution of terrestrialized breeding strategies. However, while terrestrial oviposition is strongly correlated with lowland and montane forest habitat, complete terrestrial development is significantly correlated with montane forest only, indicating different selective pressures acting at different steps towards complete terrestrial development.
Faculties and Departments:05 Faculty of Science > Departement Umweltwissenschaften > Ehemalige Einheiten Umweltwissenschaften > Biogeographie (Nagel)
UniBasel Contributors:Beck, Jan and Loader, Simon Paul and Ballesteros, Liliana and Nagel, Peter and Liedtke, Hans Christoph
Item Type:Article, refereed
Article Subtype:Research Article
Publisher:The Royal Society
ISSN:1744-9561
e-ISSN:1744-957X
Note:Publication type according to Uni Basel Research Database: Journal article
Language:English
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Last Modified:28 Nov 2018 15:02
Deposited On:31 Jan 2014 09:51

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