Temporal stability of an endemic Mexican treefrog
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Conservation Biology, Zoology
- Keywords
- Population abundance, sex ratio, treefrog, size structure, Hyla.
- Copyright
- © 2015 Cruz-Ruiz et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Temporal stability of an endemic Mexican treefrog. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1199v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1199v1
Abstract
The demographic characteristics of an amphibian population fluctuate independently over time, mainly in response to the temporal variation of environmental factors, especially precipitation and temperature. These temporal fluctuations may contribute to the effective size of an amphibian population and could be used to inform the current conservation status of a species. During a five year (2004-2008) period, we studied the relative abundance, sex ratio, and size-age structure of a population of metamorphosed individuals of the endemic treefrog Hyla eximia in Central Mexico. We also studied the species’ relationship with climatic variables such as temperatura and precipitation. We found an interannual constant abundance during the study period. However, interannual differences were observed in the population structure by age-sex category (males, females, or juveniles), with increased abundance of juveniles during the rainy months (August-November). The annual abundance of H. eximia was positively correlated with rainfall, but negatively with monthly temperature. We found the sex ratio was male-biased (2:1) except for year 2008. Also, differences in snout-vent length (SVL) were found between years, suggesting changes in recruitment of new individuals. We conclude that variations in abundance, and frequencies by age-sex category, of H. eximia are related to seasonal variations in temperature and precipitation characteristics of temperate zones. However, this temporal stability may suggest that anurans have an unusual capacity to persist even in the face of human-induced habitat change.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.