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Abstract BackgroundOur current understanding of vertebrate skin and gut microbiomes, and their vertical transmission, remains incomplete as major lineages and varied forms of parental care remain unexplored. The diverse and elaborate forms of parental care exhibited by amphibians constitute an ideal system to study microbe transmission, yet investigations of vertical transmission among frogs and salamanders have been inconclusive. In this study, we assess bacteria transmission inHerpele squalostoma,an oviparous direct-developing caecilian in which females obligately attend juveniles that feed on their mother’s skin (dermatophagy). ResultsWe used 16S rRNA amplicon-sequencing of the skin and gut of wild caughtH. squalostomaindividuals (males, females, including those attending juveniles) as well as environmental samples. Sourcetracker analyses revealed that juveniles obtain an important portion of their skin and gut bacteria communities from their mother. The contribution of a mother’s skin to the skin and gut of her respective juveniles was much larger than that of any other bacteria source. In contrast to males and females not attending juveniles, only the skins of juveniles and their mothers were colonized by bacteria taxa Verrucomicrobiaceae, Nocardioidaceae, and Erysipelotrichaceae. In addition to providing indirect evidence for microbiome transmission linked to parental care among amphibians, our study also points to noticeable differences between the skin and gut communities ofH. squalostomaand that of many frogs and salamanders, which warrants further investigation. ConclusionOur study is the first to find strong support for vertical bacteria transmission attributed to parental care in a direct-developing amphibian species. This suggests that obligate parental care may promote microbiome transmission in caecilians. 

Abstract Contemporary wildlife disease management is complex because managers need to respond to a wide range of stakeholders, multiple uncertainties, and difficult trade‐offs that characterize the interconnected challenges of today. Despite general acknowledgment of these complexities, managing wildlife disease tends to be framed as a scientific problem, in which the major challenge is lack of knowledge. The complex and multifactorial process of decision‐making is collapsed into a scientific endeavor to reduce uncertainty. As a result, contemporary decision‐making may be oversimplified, rely on simple heuristics, and fail to account for the broader legal, social, and economic context in which the decisions are made. Concurrently, scientific research on wildlife disease may be distant from this decision context, resulting in information that may not be directly relevant to the pertinent management questions. We propose reframing wildlife disease management challenges as decision problems and addressing them with decision analytical tools to divide the complex problems into more cognitively manageable elements. In particular, structured decision‐making has the potential to improve the quality, rigor, and transparency of decisions about wildlife disease in a variety of systems. Examples of management of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, white‐nose syndrome, avian influenza, and chytridiomycosis illustrate the most common impediments to decision‐making, including competing objectives, risks, prediction uncertainty, and limited resources.