Adapted from Relyea and Mills 2001 Prior amphibian toxicity testing of carbaryl had been too short to reveal this effect. Very low concentrations of carbaryl can still cause widespread amphibian death, it just takes a few more days to observe the effect. Relyea and Mills found that the effect of stressing the tadpoles by adding the predator to their tanks dramatically increased mortality. Predator cues made the pesticide 4 times more lethal. The graph on the left shows the impact of combining predator stress with carbaryl on tadpole survival.
Tadpole survival drops even lower when predator-induced stress interacts with the contaminant.