Dr. Zuania Colón-Piñeiro

NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Biology and Department of Natural History, University of Florida

Focus regions: Neotropical

Zuania Colón-Piñeiro is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Biology and the Department of Natural History at the University of Florida. She earned her B.S. and M.S. at the University of Puerto Rico at Bayamón and Río Piedras, respectively, and her Ph.D. at the University of Florida. Her research integrates ecology, physiology, and morphology to understand amphibian responses to environmental changes and diseases. She uses field observations, laboratory experiments, museum specimens, and mathematical models to disentangle energy trade-offs among physiological processes, such as growth, reproduction, and immunity. She is particularly interested in individual differences in the response to pathogens and how those differences scale up to infection and population dynamics across reproductive modes. During her NSF-PRFB fellowship sponsored by Ana V. Longo, Dave Blackburn, and Hannah Vander Zanden, she will disentangle how nutritional provisioning from amphibians with different reproductive modes responds to a changing world.

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Contributions

From the journals

Playing it safe at early life stages: Balancing energy allocations to maximize fitness under seasonal pathogen dynamics

Colón-Piñeiro, Z., Martin, N. W., Klee, T. J., Buchanan, B. L., St. Mary, C. M., Acevedo, M. A., Burrowes, P. A., & Longo, A. V. · Journal of Animal Ecology · June 2026

Juvenile amphibians are hard to monitor because of their small size, yet this is often the stage most vulnerable to disease and environmental stress. This study introduces a theoretical framework linking early-life trade-offs between growth and immune defenses to infection outcomes and individual fitness under seasonal pathogen dynamics. We parameterized the model with empirical data on growth, seasonal prey availability and Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) infection dynamics in the tropical direct-developing coqui frog, Eleutherodactylus coqui. We identified the hatching season that minimizes long-term costs of infection for individual's growth, survival, and lifetime fecundity. Because the framework is based on species-specific life-history data, conservation practitioners can retune it to find optimal release ages and seasonal windows for other vulnerable amphibians, as well as the best timing for invasive-species control. Timing interventions to match favorable conditions should increase reintroduction success and strengthen population resilience to emerging diseases.

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