Acute hypoxia exposure rapidly triggers behavioral changes linked to cutaneous gas exchange in Lake Titicaca frogs

Ventilation is critical to animal life—it ensures that individuals move air/water across their respiratory surface, and thus it sustains gas exchange with the environment. Many species have evolved highly specialized (if not unusual) ventilatory mechanisms, including the use of behavior to facilitate different aspects of breathing. However, these behavioral traits are often only described anecdotally, and the ecological conditions that elicit them are typically unclear. We study one such “ventilation behavior” in Lake Titicaca frogs (Telmatobius culeus). These frogs inhabit high-altitude (i.e., low oxygen) lakes in the Andean Mountains of South America, and they have become textbook examples of cutaneous gas exchange, which is essentially breathing that occurs across the skin. Accordingly, this species has evolved large, baggy skin-folds that dangle from the body to increase the surface area for ventilation. We show that individuals exposed to acute hypoxic conditions that mirror what free-living individuals likely encounter quickly (within minutes) decrease their activity levels, and thus become very still. If oxygen levels continue to decline, the frogs soon begin to perform push-up behaviors that presumably break the low-oxygen boundary layer around skin-folds to increase the conductance of the water/skin gas exchange pathway. Altogether, we suspect that individuals rapidly adjust aspects of their behavior in response to seemingly sudden changes to the oxygen environment as a mechanism to fine tune cutaneous respiration.