Thermal Adaptation Of The Chinese Forest Frog At Earlier Development Stages

Abstract All animals, from protozoans to mammals, avoid extremely high and low temperatures, showing a preference for intermediate range. When a thermal gradient is available, motile animals congregate within a narrow preferred thermal range. This phenomenon was termed behavioral thermoregulation or temperature preference. Fry gave a definition to the final preferendum as "a temperature around which all individuals (of a given species) will ultimately congregate, regardless of their thermal experience before being placed in a gradient". Thermal preference can reflect the optimal temperature required for some biological processes such as metabolism, movement, reproduction and growth. Actually, animals often concentrate fitness-enhancing activities, such as growth, mating, reproduction and foraging, over a narrow thermal range. It is therefore assumed that these fitness-enhancing activities are most efficient at the preferred temperature.Traditionally, acclimation has been defined as the adjustment of physiological traits in response to changes in a single environmental variable in the lab. Similarly, IUPS Thermal Commission (2003) gave the definition of acclimation as some physiological or behavioral changes occur within an organism, which reduces the strain or enhances endurance of the strain caused by experimentally induced stressful changes in particular climatic factors. Physiologists often assumed that all acclimation changes to the phenotype enhanced the physiological performance or fitness of an individual organism in the environment in which those changes were induced.Chinese forest frog belongs to the genus Rana, order Anura, phylum Amphibian, distributing in the northeastern region of China. It is listed in the second rank in the list of animals that must be protected. The Fallopian tube of this species is called forest frog oil, a very famous Chinese traditional medicine with multiple curative effects. The resources of Chinese forest frog decreases dramatically these years due to over exploited. This species has been listed in "China Red Data Book of Endangered Animals"Development and thermal tolerance of the Chinese forest frog tadpoles and the...