Extreme-sized anurans are more prone to climate-driven extinctions

Abstract

Understanding species responses to climatic change over extended timescales helps elucidate past and future extinction events. Amphibians are one of the most environmentally sensitive groups and yet showed high resilience to the Cretaceous-Paleogene (KPg) mass extinction, an event marked by sudden cooling and drought. To understand this past resilience and the associated filter mechanisms, we investigated the evolutionary history of key survival traits (body size and lifestyle) and explored climate-driven body-size selectivity of modern anuran assemblages. We found clear environment constraints on present-day anurans, where extreme temperatures and high seasonality filter against extreme-sized species. Our fossil-extant phylogenetic reconstruction reveals that anuran assemblages surrounding the KPg were mostly medium-sized species but large anuran species went extinct at the KPg, which is consistent with the uneven size-resilience to climate across modern anurans. Additionally, we found that cooling periods were marked by accelerated body-size diversification in anurans, and we inferred a close association between the evolution of arboreal frogs and angiosperms. Using the climate resilience of modern species as baselines, we estimate that future climate change will impact tropical anurans the most, where up to ∼500 species may face increased climate-related extinction pressure by 2100. Here we show that size-extinction selectivity in anurans is consistent over time and space, with extreme climate conditions filtering out larger and smaller species, conditions of which are likely to become increasingly prevalent in the future.

Keywords

• Climate change
• Body-size
• KPg
• Anuran evolution
• Mass extinction