Wood frog tadpoles that receive a transplant of green frog bacteria can swim in warm waters, revealing another role for microbiomes: heat tolerance.
Put a wood frog tadpole and a green frog tadpole in water and turn up the heat. The two species live in similar environments, but green frog tadpoles just keep swimming in water that’s up to 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer.Jason W. Dallas
The temperature difference is small, but could be meaningful, says Timothy Colston, a herpetologist at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez who was not involved in the study. “Even 1 degree of difference over a short period of time, if that gives you an advantage to being able to survive and reproduce, then that’s going to increase your fitness,” he says.
How exactly a frog’s microbiome helps the animals take more heat remains a bit of a mystery. The right bacterial population could be good for the frog’s overall health. If they’re protected, say from viruses or fungal infections, they might be better able to resist a heatwave or two, Colston says. Gut microbes could also affect how a frog’s metabolism functions, or whether and how they express proteins that resist heat.
“There’s probably a lot of cellular mechanisms and other mechanisms in play,” Dallas says. Certainly, this is not an excuse to go around dosing frog populations with bacteria during heatwaves; he and his colleagues were only able to identify broad groups of microbes involved. But it does show one way that some frogs might get hot — or not — in the face of climate change.
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