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Amphibians are ectothermic, anamniotic, four-limbed vertebrate animals that constitute the class Amphibia. In its broadest sense, it is a paraphyletic group encompassing all tetrapods excluding the amniotes (tetrapods with an amniotic membrane, such as modern reptiles, birds and mammals).
Complexity is a term that conveys the mental intractability of understanding all possible higher-order effects in a food web. Sometimes in food web terminology, complexity is defined as product of the number of species and connectance., [77] [78] [79] though there have been criticisms of this definition and other proposed methods for measuring ...
List of amphibians. The temnospondyl Eryops had sturdy limbs to support its body on land. Red-eyed tree frog (Agalychnis callidryas) with limbs and feet specialised for climbing. Japanese giant salamander (Andrias japonicus), a primitive salamander. The bright colours of the common reed frog (Hyperolius viridiflavus) are typical of a toxic species.
The position that a fish occupies in a food web is called its trophic level (Greek trophē = food). The organisms it eats are at a lower trophic level, and the organisms that eat it are at a higher trophic level. Forage fish occupy middle levels in the food web, serving as a dominant prey to higher level fish, seabirds and mammals.
Declines in amphibian populations were first widely recognized in the late 1980s [citation needed], when a large gathering of herpetologists reported noticing declines in populations in amphibians across the globe. [6] Among these species, the Golden toad (Bufo periglenes) endemic to Monteverde, Costa Rica, featured prominently.
Genus Bombina - Fire-bellied toad. Family Leiopelmatidae. Genus Leiopelma. Suborder Mesobatrachia. Family Megophryidae. Genus Borneophrys. Genus Brachytarsophrys - Karin Hills frog. Genus Leptobrachella. Genus Leptobrachium - Eastern spadefoot toad.
Clade Amniota. "Labyrinthodontia" (Greek, 'maze-toothed') is an informal grouping of extinct predatory amphibians which were major components of ecosystems in the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras (about 390 to 150 million years ago). Traditionally considered a subclass of the class Amphibia, modern classification systems recognize that ...
The majority of amphibians — except the order Gymnophiona , which are fully terrestrial burrowers — have a fully aquatic larval form known as tadpoles, but those from the order Anura (frogs and toads) and some of the order Urodela (salamanders) will metamorphosize into lung-bearing and sometimes skin-breathing terrestrial adults, and most ...