Salamander species worldwide are threatened by infection from a fungal pathogen called chytrid. Not all salamander species are equally susceptible to dying from the fungus, however, little data is available on what makes a species resistant or vulnerable to the fungus. As chytrid fungus passes through skin-skin contact between salamanders as well as through bodies of water, it is thought that salamanders that exhibit a higher degree of social behaviors as well as aquatic life stages are more at risk to contracting the disease. Knowing what specific life history traits are more conducive to contracting the disease are vital to targeting vulnerable species for protection, thereby halting chytrid’s spread. However, such data are scant, and the link between traits and disease susceptibility remains largely unknown. This study aims to fill in those gaps in understanding, and see if there is any correlation between certain life history traits of different salamander species and their susceptibility to chytrid infection. I ran an existing trait dataset for my salamander species through a regression tree analysis in R, in order to find out which traits explain most of the variation to chytrid susceptibility.
Results/Conclusions
Preliminary results suggest that salamanders who display more social behaviors such as communal nesting, group breeding, and egg guarding, and display a higher degree of aquatic lifestyle are more susceptible to contracting and exhibiting mortality from chytrid fungal infections. Other traits that do not directly interact with how chytrid transmits, such as body length, diurnality, and home range, explain much less of the variation in the chytrid susceptibility level between salamander species. This study not only highlights the utility of analyzing life history traits to infer chytrid susceptibility between salamander species, but also shows which specific traits may account for this variation in susceptibility. Through my study, I provide a framework that allows other researchers to use in order to test what traits in different species are more strongly correlated with an increased risk towards a certain disease.