Ontogeny drives shifts in skin bacterial communities in facultatively paedomorphic salamanders.

Microbiomes are major determinants of host growth, development and survival. In amphibians, host-associated bacteria in the skin can inhibit pathogen infection, but many processes can influence the structure and composition of the community. Here we quantified the shifts in skin-associated bacteria across developmental stages in the striped newt (Notophthalmus perstriatus), a threatened salamander species with a complex life history and vulnerable to infection by the amphibian chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis and ranavirus. Our analyses show that pre-metamorphic larval and paedomorphic stages share similar bacterial compositions, and that the changes in the microbiome coincided with physiological restructuring during metamorphosis. Newts undergoing metamorphosis exhibited microbiome compositions that were intermediate between paedomorphic and post-metamorphic stages, further supporting the idea that metamorphosis is a major driver of host-associated microbes in amphibians. We did not find support for infection-related disruption of the microbiome, though infection replicates were small for each respective life stage.

Global COVID-19 lockdown highlights humans as both threats and custodians of the environment.

The global lockdown to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic health risks has altered human interactions with nature. Here, we report immediate impacts of changes in human activities on wildlife and environmental threats during the early lockdown months of 2020, based on 877 qualitative reports and 332 quantitative assessments from 89 different studies. Hundreds of reports of unusual species observations from around the world suggest that animals quickly responded to the reductions in human presence. However, negative effects of lockdown on conservation also emerged, as confinement resulted in some park officials being unable to perform conservation, restoration and enforcement tasks, resulting in local increases in illegal activities such as hunting. Overall, there is a complex mixture of positive and negative effects of the pandemic lockdown on nature, all of which have the potential to lead to cascading responses which in turn impact wildlife and nature conservation. While the net effect of the lockdown will need to be assessed over years as data becomes available and persistent effects emerge, immediate responses were detected across the world. Thus, initial qualitative and quantitative data arising from this serendipitous global quasi-experimental perturbation highlights the dual role that humans play in threatening and protecting species and ecosystems. Pathways to favorably tilt this delicate balance include reducing impacts and increasing conservation effectiveness.

Passive acoustic sampling data of the Colección de Sonidos Ambientales Mauricio Álvarez-Rebolledo - Instituto Humboldt (IAvH-CSA) during 2018 and 2019 in Colombia.

We present the dataset of passive acoustic sampling events deposited in the Colección de Sonidos Ambientales Mauricio Álvarez-Rebolledo at the Humboldt Institute (IAvH-CSA) during the years 2018-2019. The acoustic sampling events were generated from different projects, including Colombia Bio, Santander Bio, Boyacá Bio, Lisama, Riqueza Natural, and occasional events collected during this time. In total, 44,704 sampling events are deposited in the collection, corresponding to 1 minute of automatic recording sampled at a 44.1 kHz sampling rate and 16-bit resolution. The recording schedules correspond to 1 minute every 5, 10, or 30 min throughout the day, during 1 to 20 sampling days, across 79 localities in Colombia. The geographical coverage includes the departments of Bolívar, Boyacá, Caquetá, Cundinamarca, Meta, Santander, and Sucre. The present information was collected within the framework of the passive monitoring methodology established by the Humboldt Institute .

Dataset on audio records of animals from the northeast Andes of Colombia I: The bird sounds of Boyacá department.

This dataset is the first effort to combine the audio biodiversity of a taxonomic group in a selected location, the Boyacá department in Colombia. We conducted a detailed review of the sound recordings for birds from the Boyacá department within three repositories, the environmental sound collection of the Humboldt Institute, the Macaulay Library of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the xeno-canto platform of the Naturalis Biodiversity Center. We selected recordings that were identified up to species and had complete metadata information. Using latitude and longitude information, we assigned each recording to one of the three regions and one of the 12 biotic units reported for Boyacá. We reported a total of 2321 recordings belonging to the Andean region (1892), Orinoquian region (425), and Carare-Lebrija-Nechi-Sinu (4). The sounds of Boyacá birds have been sampled for approximately three decades, with two peaks of activity in the early 2000's and 2018. We also included a map with the distribution of biotic units and sound recordings of our dataset. This dataset can be used to extract acoustic traits to test hypotheses of turnover in the acoustic space or traits by species, or to compare acoustic traits between species. It can also allow decision-makers to support biodiversity-based economies such as avitourism.

The advertisement call of Allobates niputidea (Anura: Aromobatidae).

In anurans, acoustic signal traits are useful for understanding patterns of evolutionary processes, behavioral interactions, and providing diagnostic characters for inferring phylogenetic relationships and delimiting species (Cocroft Ryan 1995). The advertisement call, which is the vocalization emitted to attract females or segregate conspecific males, is the most conspicuous and studied acoustic signal (Toledo et. al. 2014). However, it remains unknown for many anuran species (Köhler et al. 2017; Guerra et al. 2018).