At the physiological level, animals constantly need to maintain a positive energy and water balance in order to meet their short and long-term energy requirements for growth, development and reproduction ( McNab, 2002). At a landscape level, they influence species abundance as well as activity patterns ( Dabés et al., 2012 Peterman & Semlitsch, 2014). Water and temperature are the two most important ecological determinants of species distribution patterns ( Buckley & Jetz, 2007 Qian et al., 2007 Riddell et al., 2017) through their influence on environmental energy availability ( Currie, 1991 Chown et al., 2003). Thus, the generality of M b as an important factor should be taken in the context of both physiology and species habitat specialisation. These results suggest that M b may not have the same effect on key physiological variables, and that the influence of M b may also depend on the species ecological specialisation. Lastly, M b did not influence T b, whole-animal SMR and EWL in the principally aquatic X. We did not find any significant effect of VPD, M b or sex on whole-animal EWL within species. Whole-animal SMR increased with increasing M b in S. Moreover, we found that T b, whole-animal EWL and whole-animal SMR increased with increasing T a, while T b increased with increasing M b in A. We found that VPD better predicted rates of EWL than T a in two of the three species considered. Experiments were conducted at a range of test temperatures (5–35 ☌, at 5 ☌ increments). Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate the role of T a on T b, whole-animal EWL and whole-animal SMR in three wild caught African anuran species with different ecological specialisations: the principally aquatic African clawed frog ( Xenopus laevis), stream-breeding common river frog ( Amietia delalandii), and the largely terrestrial raucous toad ( Sclerophrys capensis). However, a limited number of studies have tested the generality of these results across a wide range of ecologically relevant ambient temperatures ( T a), while taking habitat use into account. Since anurans display pronounced sexual dimorphism, evidence suggests that these processes are further influenced by other factors such as vapour pressure deficit (VPD), sex and body mass ( M b).
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Temperature and water availability are two of the most important variables affecting all aspects of an anuran’s key physiological processes such as body temperature ( T b), evaporative water loss (EWL) and standard metabolic rate (SMR). The role of ambient temperature and body mass on body temperature, standard metabolic rate and evaporative water loss in southern African anurans of different habitat specialisation. Cite this article Mokhatla M, Measey J, Smit B. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited. Licence This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed.
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4 Department Zoology, Nelson Mandela University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa DOI 10.7717/peerj.7885 Published Accepted Received Academic Editor Christian Hof Subject Areas Conservation Biology, Ecology, Zoology, Climate Change Biology Keywords Evaporative water loss, Frogs, Standard metabolic rate, Body mass, Temperature Copyright © 2019 Mokhatla et al.