Journal of Heredity Advance Access originally published online on September 6, 2006
Journal of Heredity 2006 97(5):499-507; doi:10.1093/jhered/esl019
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Inbreeding Linked to Amphibian Survival in the Wild but Not in the Laboratory
From the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University, 370 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06520 (Halverson, Skelly, and Caccone); the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520 (Skelly and Caccone); and the Yale Institute for Biospheric Sciences, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520 (Caccone). M. A. Halverson is now at the University of Colorado, Center of the American West, 282 UCB, Mackey 229, Boulder, CO 80309
Address correspondence to M. A. Halverson at the address above, or e-mail: halversa{at}cires.colorado.edu.
We examined the effects of inbreeding on the performance of wood frog (Rana sylvatica) larvae in the field and in the laboratory. We used microsatellite analysis to establish the parentage and degree of inbreeding of the larvae. Two different estimators of inbreeding were used. The first was based on average multilocus heterozygosity, and the second was based on a molecular relatedness estimator. The estimators were highly correlated, and both showed a significant negative relationship between inbreeding and survival in the wild. However, there was no evidence that inbreeding influenced growth or development in the wild. Neither was there any evidence that inbreeding affected survival, growth, or development in the laboratory. These results suggest that, for wood frogs, inbreeding has a bigger effect on fitness in the wild than in captivity and that measurements of survival are more sensitive than measures of growth or development.