Developmental and carry-over cost of pond drying in amphibians

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This repository contains code and data needed to reproduce the article: Wu N. C., Fuh N. T., Borzée A., Wu C. S., Kam, Y. C., & Chuang M. F. Developmental plasticity to pond drying has carry-over costs on metamorph performance. (2025), Conservation Physiology, 13, coaf008, DOI: DOI Raw data larvae_data.csv - Data for the tadpole length across treatment days. metamorph_data.csv - Data on various traits measured in the experiments for both tapdoles and metamorphs. Analysis workflow supplementary_information.html - Supplementary information which contains the R workflow for processing and analysing the raw data, creating figures, and supplementary material for statistical outcomes, additional figures, and descriptions from the main document. Increasing variable hydroperiods may leave ectotherms with complex life cycles more vulnerable to the impacts of environmental drying. While developmental plasticity may enable some species to escape drying ponds, this plasticity might result in trade-offs with performance and subsequent fitness in adults. Here, we used rice paddy frogs (Fejervarya limnocharis) to test how pond drying influences the developmental plasticity of tadpoles, and the resulting carryover effects on body size and jumping performance. We predicted that tadpoles under simulated drought conditions (2–0.25 cm depth) compared to low stable water level conditions (0.25 cm depth) would develop faster, and the resulting metamorphs would be smaller and exhibit lower jumping performance. We show that tadpoles in drying conditions had a faster developmental rate than tadpoles in stable low water level treatments. The size of metamorphs from the drying treatment was similar to the high-water treatments (2 cm depth), but maximum jumping distance of individuals from the drying condition was lower than that of the high-water treatment. These results indicate that drying conditions for F. limnocharis increase development rate without a reduction in size at metamorphosis, but with poorer mass-independent locomotor performance, which can potentially impact their survival.