Devastating disease can cause increased breeding effort and success that improves population resilience

Novel and invasive diseases are a key threat to wildlife and can cause massive, unprecedented declines and extinctions. The amphibian fungal disease chytridiomycosis has had devastating global impacts, but after severe declines some amphibian species can persist and even rebound. Understanding how these species survive is critical to discovering management techniques for supporting declining species. Here we explored the impacts of disease on reproduction in frogs, investigating its effect on primary and secondary sexual characteristics and breeding effort and success.  Male frogs are increasing various facets of their breeding efforts resulting in increased offspring. Infected male frogs have 1) increased vocal sac coloration, 2) increased sperm quality, and 3) higher mating success and father more egg masses than uninfected males. Ongoing high mortality due to chytridiomycosis in these species appears to be balanced by high reproduction. Management efforts should target the natur..., Study species

Litoria verreauxii alpina, the alpine tree frog, is endemic to the Australian Alps and is considered critically endangered in both New South Wales and Victoria, Australia. Since the introduction of the fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis in the 1980s, this once widespread species has experienced dramatic declines and is now present in <20% of its former range (Osborne et al. 1999). The species now inhabits 8-10 sites across the Alps. While the species is inhabiting a much smaller area than they were historically, the populations at these remaining sites appear to be relatively stable. The species is highly susceptible to B. dendrobatidis infection and experiences near complete population turnover every year (Brannelly et al. 2015, Scheele et al. 2015). It is well understood that the species is persisting in these habitats due to breeding (Brannelly et al. 2020a, 2021a), but it was unclear if the species was actively increasing their breeding output to persis..., , # Devastating disease can cause increased breeding effort and success that improves population resilience

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.vx0k6dk0f](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.vx0k6dk0f)

## Description of files

The files included in this data set were collected from the field and from laboratory infection experiments.

#### Field data:

* `Lva_Field_Breeding.csv` indicates the males that were captured during the capture mark recapture study, and data were collected on the individual males. Species is Lva for all, which is Litoria verreauxii alpina, and the site is BR for all, which means they were all collected at the same site. Date is in day_mo_yyyy format, and Julian_day is also provided. Week indicates the week of the CMR trial. Each animal was given a day of `Field_ID`, and if they were recaptured, the individual the `Recapture_ID` corresponds to the `Concatenated_Field_ID` on first capture. `Individual_ID` is the unique individual identification used in analyses. `Recapture` ...,