Jon Bielby

Liverpool John Moores University | LJMU · School of Biological and Environmental Science

The exotic pet trade is a global industry with considerable implications for a range of taxa and stakeholders. The scale of the trade means it receives coverage in both popular and scientific media, and some narratives may receive more attention than others. As these media play an important role in shaping public opinion, policy, and legislation, w...

Background – Musculoskeletal diseases (MSDs) are an increasing issue as the lifespan of captive animals increases. Extracts of green-lipped mussels have been linked to alleviation of MSDs in domestic carnivores. Understanding their efficacy in non-domestic felids could provide another tool in improved welfare of aged individuals in collections. M...

The companion dog is one of the most phenotypically diverse species. Variability between breeds extends not only to morphology and aspects of behaviour, but also to longevity. Despite this fact, little research has been devoted to assessing variation in life expectancy between breeds or evaluating the potential for phylogenetic characterisation of...

Online sales are increasingly a route by which exotic animals are sold in the global pet trade. There are numerous types of online platforms and transaction types, and dedicated classified advertisement sites are a popular means of buying and selling animals. Despite their large and increasing use, we have a relatively poor understanding of the num...

Chytridiomycosis is affecting hundreds of amphibian species worldwide, but while in tropical areas, adult individuals have been the focus of most investigations, the exact role played by infection intensity of breeding adults is not well understood in temperate areas. We conducted mark–recapture–capture surveys during spiny common toad breeding sea...

Wildlife trade is driving species extinctions globally, and the Asian Turtle Crisis is posing a threat in China as turtle species are collected from the wild and sold at high prices. Local ecological knowledge is increasingly used to determine the status of threatened taxa, but there is little understanding of wider relationships between indices of...

Variability between dog breeds extends not only to morphology and aspects of behaviour, but also to longevity. Nevertheless, little research has (1) assessed life expectancy variation between breeds, and (2) investigated phylogenetic characterisation of longevity. This is partly due to a lack of informative, comparable, and accessible data regardin...

The intensity of a pathogen infection plays a key role in determining how the host responds to infection. Hosts with high infections are more likely to transmit infection to others, and are may be more likely to experience progression from infection to disease symptoms, to being physiologically compromised by disease. Understanding how and why host...

Amphibians are the most highly threatened vertebrates, and emerging pathogens are a serious threat to their conservation. Amphibian chytrid fungi and the viruses of the Ranavirus genus are causing disease outbreaks worldwide, including in protected areas such as National Parks. However, we lack information about their effect over amphibian populati...

Understanding the occurrence and consequence of co-infections can be useful in designing disease management interventions. Amphibians are the most highly threatened vertebrates, and emerging pathogens are a serious threat to their conservation. The amphibian chytrid fungus and the viruses of the Ranavirus genus are already widely distributed, causi...

Most parasites and pathogens infect multiple hosts, but a great deal of variation exists in the role of those hosts in persistence of infection. Understanding which hosts are most important in maintaining parasites can provide a clearer target for infection control. Recently developed empirical and theoretical approaches provide a way to quantify t...

As a result of anthropogenic activities, changes to the chemistry of Earth's atmosphere pose a threat to ecosystem health and biodiversity. One such change is the increase in tropospheric ozone (O3), which is particularly severe in the Mediterranean basin area, where the levels of this pollutant are chronically high during spring and summer time. W...

Long-term baselines on biodiversity change through time are crucial to inform conservation decision-making in biodiversity hotspots, but environmental archives remain unavailable for many regions. Extensive palaeontological, zooarchaeological and historical records and indigenous knowledge about past environmental conditions exist for China, a mega...

Introduction of alien fish is a major problem for the conservation of amphibians inhabiting originally fishless mountain streams. While fish eradication programs in lakes and ponds have proven successful for the recovery of amphibian populations, there is no such information for stream-dwelling amphibians, possibly because fish removal from streams...

Ecosystems have been modified by human activities for millennia, and insights about ecology and extinction risk based only on recent data are likely to be both incomplete and biased. We synthesize multiple long-term archives (over 250 archaeological and palaeontological sites dating from the early Holocene to the Ming Dynasty and over 4400 historic...

Meerkats (Suricata suricatta) are routinely anesthetized with isoflurane in zoo and field settings. Twenty healthy adult meerkats of mixed age and sex held in the Zoological Society of London's collection were anesthetized with 4% isoflurane by face mask for routine health examinations. The procedure was repeated 5 mo later in the same group of ani...

The identification of historic and contemporary barriers to dispersal is central to the conservation of endangered amphibians, but may be hindered by their complex life history and elusive nature. The complementary information generated by mitochondrial (mtDNA) and microsatellite markers generates a valuable tool in elucidating population structure...

We present a review on the conservation status of the 177 species and subspecies of amphibians of Argentina and compare the first national assessment, conducted in 2000, with the most recent one, from 2012, to determine changes in conservation status over time. We also evaluate the degree of taxonomic and geographic non-randomness in extinction ris...

Changes in the timings of seasonality as a result of anthropogenic climate change are predicted to occur over the coming decades. While this is expected to have widespread impacts on the dynamics of infectious disease through environmental forcing, empirical data are lacking. Here, we investigated whether seasonality, specifically the timing of spr...

Changes in the timings of seasonality as a result of anthropogenic climate change are predicted to occur over the coming decades. While this is expected to have widespread impacts on the dynamics of infectious disease through environmental forcing, empirical data are lacking. Here, we investigated whether seasonality, specifically the timing of spr...

Bovine tuberculosis is an important disease affecting the UK livestock industry. Controlling bovine tuberculosis (TB) is made more complex by the presence of a wildlife host, the Eurasian badger, Meles meles. Repeated large-scale badger culls implemented in the Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT) were associated with decreased cattle risks insid...

The majority of parasites infect multiple hosts. As the outcome of the infection is different in each of them, most studies of wildlife disease focus on the few species that suffer the most severe consequences. However, the role that each host plays in the persistence and trans - mission of infection can be crucial to understanding the spread of a...

Extended results; Supplementary Data Table 1. The differences in infection intensity (GE), by year, between A) B. spinosus and R. temporaria compared to A. obstetricans and B) between B. spinosus compared to R. temporaria; Supplementary Data Figure 1) R-squared of linear regressions; Supplementary Data Figure 2) Current, and future mean daily tempe...

Extended results; Supplementary Data Table 1. The differences in infection intensity (GE), by year, between A) B. spinosus and R. temporaria compared to A. obstetricans and B) between B. spinosus compared to R. temporaria; Supplementary Data Figure 1) R-squared of linear regressions; Supplementary Data Figure 2) Current, and future mean daily tempe...

The amphibian parasite Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) is regarded as an extreme generalist, infecting over 500 species, but amongst these hosts there exists a great deal of variation in the susceptibility to and the costs of parasite exposure. We use two infection experiments to determine whether inter-specific variation in the sublethal and l...

Cost‐effective reduction of uncertainty in global biodiversity indicators is a central goal of conservation. Comprising a sixth of the 74 000+ species currently on the IUCN Red List, Data Deficient species contribute to considerable uncertainty in estimates of extinction risk. Estimating levels of risk in Data Deficient species will require large r...

Predator–prey relationships are vital to ecosystem function and there is a need for greater predic-tive understanding of these interactions. We develop a geometric foraging model predicting mini-mum prey size scaling in marine and terrestrial vertebrate predators taking into account habitat dimensionality and biological traits. Our model predicts p...

Where wildlife disease requires management, culling is frequently considered but not always effective. In the British Isles, control of cattle tuberculosis (TB) is hindered by infection in wild badger (Meles meles) populations. Large-scale badger culling can reduce the incidence of confirmed cattle TB, but these benefits are undermined by culling-i...

Sexual size dimorphism (SSD) is widespread among amphibians, and it is attributed to fecundity selection, invoked for female-biased-SSD species, sexual selection, usually invoked for male-biased-SSD species, or other forms of natural selection. Further, SSD interplays with body size variability at population level. By using a male-biased-SSD newt (...

Given the budgetary restrictions on scientific research and the increasing need to better inform conservation actions, it is important to identify the patterns and causes of biases in research effort. We combine bibliometric information from a literature review of almost 16,500 peer-reviewed publications on a well-known group of 286 species, the Or...

In a highly endemic, threatened amphibian assemblage, we measure and describe the geographic and taxonomic distribution of the amphibian chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), with a view to identifying those sites and species most at risk of infection and its negative consequences. Additionally, we aimed to determine the potential fo...

Amphibians are globally threatened, but not all species are affected equally by different threatening processes. This is true for the threat posed by the chytridiomycete fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis) . We compiled a European data set for B. dendrobatidis to analyze the trends of infection in European amphibians. The risk of infection was...

Between 2006 and 2010, recurring morbidity and mortality of the endemic Lake Oku clawed frog Xenopus longipes was observed at its only known locality, Lake Oku, Cameroon. During repeated visits in 2006, 2008, 2009 and 2010, we found large numbers of dead frogs around the lake shore, as well as a higher than expected prevalence of diseased frogs. No...

An important driver of amphibian declines is chytridiomy-cosis, a disease caused by the pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd; Berger et al. 1998; Daszak et al. 1999, 2003; Ron and Merino-Viteri 2000; Bosch et al. 2001; Collins and Stor-fer 2003, Ron et al. 2003; La Marca et al. 2005; Wake and Vre-denburg 2008; Walker et al. 2010). Bd is now...

An important driver of amphibian declines is chytridiomy-cosis, a disease caused by the pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd; Berger et al. 1998; Daszak et al. 1999, 2003; Ron and Merino-Viteri 2000; Bosch et al. 2001; Collins and Stor-fer 2003, Ron et al. 2003; La Marca et al. 2005; Wake and Vre-denburg 2008; Walker et al. 2010). Bd is now...

Worldwide amphibian declines and species losses are global problems and emerging infectious diseases have been identified as one of the major threats. The worst of these is chytridiomycosis, an amphibian disease caused by the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd). Here we review what is known of the distribution of Bd and chytridiomyco...

The rapid worldwide emergence of the amphibian pathogen () is having a profound negative impact on biodiversity. However, global research efforts are fragmented and an overarching synthesis of global infection data is lacking. Here, we provide results from a community tool for the compilation of worldwide presence and report on the analyses of data...

Taxonomic patterns of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) occurrence by latitude. The extraordinary peak in species richness in the 8°N range highlights the overlap of many families of amphibians in Central America and also the intensive sampling represented by Lips et al. (2003, 2006). Of additional interest are the very broad latitudinal ranges o...

Occurrence of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis at sites by elevation, with annotation by ecoregion of site. Vertical black lines indicate the range of elevations covered by a particular ecoregion. For the most part, only ecoregions or aggregates of ecoregions with more than 20 sites represented are shown in the annotation. Low elevation sites (below...

Occurrence of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) at sites among 15 world biomes. ‘Lake’ (98) was dropped from our analyses, as there was only one site so classified owing to the coarse scale of the bioregional data relative to our site locations. Among biomes, the highest odds of detecting Bd were in Montane Grasslands and Shrublands (Biome 10, re...

Occurrence of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) at sites by latitude. The high number of sample sites in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly the United States and Spain, gives a pronounced skew to this distribution. (TIF)

Parameters used in regression analyses. Numbers in parentheses after biomes indicate number of sites in the full analysis (N = 3733 total sites). Sites with no biome assigned (n = 227) were dropped from the analysis. Lake biome (N = 1 site) was also dropped due to inconsistency of lentic habitat designation. (DOCX)

Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) occurrence by 6th-field Hydrologic Units (HU; watershed) for the U.S.A. Natural resource planning and management decisions often occur by watershed in the US. For example, disease disinfection protocols often stipulate disinfection between drainages, and 6th-field watershed delineations are used for water draw de...

Significant parameters in three family-scale logistic regression models using Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) occurrence data from wild-occurring amphibians having exact and approximate locations in the global Bd database. Individual biome coefficients represent additive shifts in the Bd-occurrence odds ratio, whereas other coefficients represe...

Bd detections by species, with references and countries of detection. Family-level taxonomy is shown according to Frost et al. (2006), Grant et al. (2006), Frost (2009), and Hedges et al. (2008). Species name is shown as given in the report of the Bd occurrence. Where assignments to genus or species have changed since the species was reported as be...

Supplemental Information: Taxonomic Notes; References for Supplemental Material. (DOCX)

Aim To investigate the impact of different treatments of the IUCN D ata D eficient ( DD ) category on taxonomic and geographical patterns of extinction risk in crayfish, freshwater crabs and dragonflies. Location Global. Methods We used contingency tables to evaluate taxonomic and geographical selectivity of data deficiency and extinction risk fo...

Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) is a globally ubiquitous fungal infection that has emerged to become a primary driver of amphibian biodiversity loss. Despite widespread effort to understand the emergence of this panzootic, the origins of the infection, its patterns of global spread, and principle mode of evolution remain largely unknown. Using...

Identifying tradeoffs between hunting and scavenging in an ecological context is important for understanding predatory guilds. In the past century, the feeding strategy of one of the largest and best-known terrestrial carnivores, Tyrannosaurus rex, has been the subject of much debate: was it an active predator or an obligate scavenger? Here we look...

Amphibians are globally declining and approximately one-third of all species are threatened with extinction. Some of the most severe declines have occurred suddenly and for unknown reasons in apparently pristine habitats. It has been hypothesized that these "rapid enigmatic declines" are the result of a panzootic of the disease chytridiomycosis cau...

Many recent studies of extinction risk have attempted to determine what differences exist between threatened and non-threatened species. One potential problem in such studies is that species-level data may contain phylogenetic non-independence. However, the use of phylogenetic comparative methods (PCM) to account for non-independence remains contro...

Analyses of life-history, ecological, and geographic trait differences among species, their causes, correlates, and likely consequences are increasingly important for understanding and conserving biodiversity in the face of rapid global change. Assembling multispecies trait data from diverse literature sources into a single comprehensive data set r...

Species are being lost at increasing rates due to anthropogenic effects, leading to the recognition that we are witnessing the onset of a sixth mass extinction. Emerging infectious disease has been shown to increase species loss and any attempts to reduce extinction rates need to squarely confront this challenge. Here, we develop a procedure for id...

Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), the causative agent of the amphibian disease chytridiomycosis, is an important factor in the global decline of amphibians. Within Europe, animals that exhibit clinical signs of the disease have only been reported in Spain despite the pathogen's wide, but patchy, distribution on the continent. Recently, another o...