New Paper on Wood Frog Physiology

Extreme temperature fluctuations are becoming more common around the world, exposing wildlife to unique and unfamiliar thermal conditions. Recently discovered links between an animal’s physiology and the beneficial bacteria and other “microbiota” in their gut suggest an animal’s ability to cope with future climates may be partly dependent on the effects that environmental temperatures exert on their gut microbiota. “Cold-blooded” animals, like amphibians, may be particularly sensitive because their body temperatures are dictated by the temperature of their environment. To investigate potential effects of rising temperatures on the gut microbiota of amphibians, Great Hollow’s executive director Chad Seewagen and former naturalist John Foley assisted with a collaborative study led by UConn doctoral student, Grace Vaziri, that tested whether the gut microbiota of wood frogs are resilient to the high temperatures to which frogs are projected to be exposed in the future. Using wood frogs sampled from South Carolina to Vermont to represent populations adapted to various local climates, Grace and the team exposed frogs to a range of predicted future temperatures in mesocosms at UConn and then examined changes in the species composition and diversity of the frogs’ gut microbiota. Regardless of the region from which the frogs came, the study found high temperature exposure to have no effect on the frogs’ microbiome. Published in the journal, Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A, these encouraging results suggest amphibian gut microbiota and the myriad benefits they provide to their hosts may be robust to future temperature conditions.

​Full article available here

Vaziri, G.J., B. Caicedo, N. Dahrouge, W.G. Ryerson, J.M. Davenport, M. Stager, K.R. Jones, C. Frost, C.L. Seewagen, T.A.G. Rittenhouse, and D.I. Bolnick. 2025. Gut microbiomes are largely unchanged when exposed to their amphibian host’s latitudinally variable upper thermal limit. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Part A 302:111816.

(wood frog photo by John Foley)