Emerging Infectious Diseases in Amphibians: from Individuals to Community Effects

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Understanding Emerging Infectious diseases (EIDs) ecology and evolution is a key to the more general investigations of extinction. While determining the cause of extinction is always challenging and candidate species are few, amphibian appear to be an ideal model as increasing evidence suggests that we are facing a global population decline with nearly 10% of the populations of all amphibian species close to extinction and a further 32% being classified as threatened. Among many causes, Emergent Infectious Diseases (EIDs) such as Ranavirus have been identified to be responsible for massive die-offs. In the context of the general debate over global amphibian population decline, the objective of my ongoing research program is to investigate the ecology and evolution of such disease and to understand how it can lead to pathogen-induced extinctions. Additionally, I consider this study system to be ideal to investigate questions with regards to the links between ecological and evolutionary processes and the understanding of mechanisms that modulate host-parasite coevolutionary outcomes at different level of organization.