Published in Integrated environmental assessment and management
Chemical exposure estimation through the dermal route is an underemphasized area of ecological risk assessment for terrestrial animals. Currently, there are efforts to create exposure models to estimate doses from this pathway for use in ecological risk assessment. One significant limitation has been insufficient published data to characterize expo...
Published in Frontiers for Young Minds
When looking around outside, many people see reasons to worry about the environment. Often what they notice are the effects of pollution and climate change, which can be harmful to people, wildlife, and the ecosystems where they live. Understanding the condition of all living and non-living things in an ecosystem is important for maintaining a heal...
Published in Peptides
Amphibians have a great diversity of bioactive peptides in their skin. The cDNA prepro-peptide sequencing allowed the identification of five novel mature peptides expressed in the skin of Boana pulchella, four with similar sequences to hylin peptides having a cationic amphipathic-helical structure. Whole mature peptides and some of their fragments ...
Published in Environmental toxicology and chemistry
Amphibia is the most threatened class among vertebrates, with >40% of the species threatened with extinction. Pollution is thought to alter amphibian population dynamics. With the growing interest in behavioral ecotoxicology, the neurotoxic organophosphate pesticides are of special concern. Understanding how exposure to neurotoxics leads to behavio...
Published in Biological trace element research
Certain amphibian species have long served as a valuable protein source for humans, in addition to being good bioindicators for environmental pollutants. Hence, to investigate the consumption outcomes leading to potential health risks, we determined the trace element (TE) levels in the hind leg and liver tissues of marsh frogs (Pelophylax ridibundu...
Growing evidence suggests that the origins of the panzootic amphibian pathogens Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) and Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal) are in Asia. In Taiwan, an island hotspot of high amphibian diversity, no amphibian mass mortality events linked to Bd or Bsal have been reported. We conducted a multi-year study across thi...
Published in The Science of the total environment
One of the biggest challenges in ecological risk assessment is determining the impact of multiple stressors on individual organisms and populations in real world scenarios. Frequently, data derived from laboratory studies of single stressors are used to estimate risk parameters and do not adequately address scenarios where other stressors exist. Em...
Published in Molecular phylogenetics and evolution
The systematics of the African frog family Hyperoliidae has undergone turbulent changes in last decades. Representatives of several genera have not been genetically investigated or with only limited data, and their phylogenetic positions are thus still not reliably known. This is the case of the De Witte's Clicking Frog (Kassinula wittei) which bel...
Published in Journal of thermal biology
Climate change is expected to increase mean temperatures and the frequency of extreme weather events, that can lead to earlier/extended breeding seasons in temperate taxa. As a consequence, many organisms that show climate-induced phenological shifts might be exposed to environmental conditions they are not well adapted to while breeding, and their...
Published in Immunogenetics
Habitat fragmentation and infectious diseases threaten wildlife globally, but the interactions of these threats are poorly understood. For instance, while habitat fragmentation can impact genetic diversity at neutral loci, the impacts on disease-relevant loci are less well-studied. We examined the effects of habitat fragmentation in Brazil's Atlant...
