Journal article
Whether the Weather Drives Patterns of Endemic Amphibian Chytridiomycosis: A Pathogen Proliferation Approach
KA Murray, LF Skerratt, S Garland, D Kriticos, H McCallum
Plos One | PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE | Published : 2013
Open access
Abstract
The pandemic amphibian disease chytridiomycosis often exhibits strong seasonality in both prevalence and disease-associated mortality once it becomes endemic. One hypothesis that could explain this temporal pattern is that simple weather-driven pathogen proliferation (population growth) is a major driver of chytridiomycosis disease dynamics. Despite various elaborations of this hypothesis in the literature for explaining amphibian declines (e.g., the chytrid thermal-optimum hypothesis) it has not been formally tested on infection patterns in the wild. In this study we developed a simple process-based model to simulate the growth of the pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) under varyi..
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Awarded by Australian Research Council
Awarded by Australian Government Department of the Environment and Heritage
Funding Acknowledgements
Major funding for the project was supplied by Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP0451402 to H. McCallum, R. Speare, A. Hyatt, and P. Daszak. K. Murray was supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award, an Australian Biosecurity CRC professional development award, and a Wildlife Preservation Society of Australia student research award. Funding by the Australian Government Department of the Environment and Heritage (tender 42/2004 on the epidemiology of chytridiomycosis) contributed to the cost of diagnostic testing, and we thank R. Campbell for some of the PCR analyses. K. Murray was partially supported while writing the manuscript by EcoHealth Alliance and a James Cook University - Griffith University Collaboration Grant to L. Skerratt, H. McCallum and J-M. Hero. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.