The disease, and getting more resources to study it

While all the causes described above are factors in global declines of amphibians, the chytrid fungal disease is primary cause of the current cascade of extinctions in higher altitude regions throughout Central America. Every place that still has a diverse amphibian diversity associated with intact jungle is losing species of frogs.

Dr. Karen Lips has been the main scientist who has described this loss in Central America. By 2007, she had worked west of El Valle, at El Cope, Fortuna, and in Costa Rica for over a decade. She studied frogs intensively at these sites, and collected and identified as many species she could.
Karen was working on her dissertation in Costa Rica when the frogs suddenly disappeared. She was at Fortuna in Panama and the frogs vanished there. There was no obvious cause of mortality. The Fortuna site is old growth jungle, minimally impacted by humans.

Perhaps the most intense experience Dr. Lips had was in the forest at El Cope in 2004 when the disease front swept through the site. In a period of a couple of weeks most of the adult frogs died. Dead frogs were literally falling from the trees. She found species that she had never described before dying on the jungle floor. This was the first time she had seen these species because they spent all or much of their lives up in the trees where they were extremely difficult to collect.

The dying frogs all had the telltale sign of chytrid infections, sloughing skin. It is difficult to imagine how Karen felt in this situation. This was an area she had been studying for years, and she was watching the animals she had dedicated her career to die in front of her. Many people would have simply given up at this point. Karen kept going. She took samples and sent them out to experts to confirm that the chytrid was indeed present and causing the infection.

As time went on, Dr. Lips mapped the spread of the infection. It killed frogs in the high altitude rain forests in a wave of infection spreading generally from north to south in Central America (but from west to east in Panama because of the orientation of the country). The disease apparently can infect, but not kill lowland species. It is not lethal but can spread through these populations in warmer areas. When the disease is passed to the next mountain range where the temperatures are lower, the disease becomes fatal and extinctions begin again as it sweeps through populations of susceptible frogs.

There is no known cure for the fungal disease in the wild, but infected individuals can be treated with chemicals in the lab if they are not too far gone. Presently, the only way to save susceptible species from extinction is to collect them and grow them in aquaria where they are not exposed to the disease. Tadpoles have been re-released into the wild a few years after the disease has killed all the adult frogs. They die from the disease when they metamorphose and emerge as adults. Apparently, once an area is infected by the chytrid, the deadly fungus remains even if the frogs that it infects are gone.

Karen was a colleague of Matt’s at Southern Illinois University and she got Matt interested in the ecosystem consequences of the loss of these species. She knew the Central American frogs as well as anybody, but did not have the expertise in stream ecology to assess the effects on the other plants, animals and microbes in the streams.

Matt had the expertise in stream ecology, and his lifetime interest in herpetology (he has kept poisonous snakes since college) drew him into the project. Matt takes vacations to the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico to see snakes and lizards; his idea of a good time is turning over rocks to see what is under them. Even after he got bit (tagged) by one of his “pet” rattlesnakes he still kept them as pets. It was not until he had children that he thinned back his considerable collection of venomous snakes.

In one of their discussions, Karen told Matt how the rocks at Fortuna had gotten slippery and greener after the disease hit. At that point a light bulb went on and Matt realized that the loss of the extremely high density of tadpoles that occurred naturally in the streams could have important ecosystem consequences. Karen got Matt to go down to Panama and see her sites, and Matt cooked up the idea of assessing the ecosystem consequences of frog extinctions.

All researchers involved with this phenomenon realize the necessity of rapid work on the frog populations. Researching the Panamanian frog extinctions is essential because there will not be a second chance. Once the tadpoles are gone from a stream, they will not be back. This was a problem Matt could not ignore. Practically, this meant obtaining funding to work on figuring out the consequences of the disease that was killing the frogs. Now, the first round of that funding was almost gone, and more was needed to keep the research going.

Matt’s proposal to continue the work previously funded by the National Science Foundation received excellent scores, but it was rejected. This was not completely unexpected, but was still very disappointing. Less than five percent of the proposals in the competition were funded. Only one out of every twenty proposals written by the top academic researchers in the world was selected for funding by this program. The National Science Foundation funds the vast majority of the basic ecological research done in the United States.

The rejection put Matt in a difficult position. He needed to re-submit the proposal immediately to meet the next deadline (proposals were only evaluated every 6 months) and it was difficult to decide how to revise the proposal because the reviews were so positive. Nonetheless, he strengthened and re-wrote the proposal in only a few weeks. After thorough review by all the official project investigators (Karen Lips, Cathy Pringle, Susan Kilham) and associated participants (Bob, Alex, and me), it was sent off. The clock was ticking, and longer delays would make research impossible.

Science is not only about writing good proposals, but also about self promotion. When funding is so competitive, only the researchers that are able to publish their work in the top science journals in the world are able to continue getting funded.

Peer reviewed publication is the ultimate yardstick of scientific success. The system is set up to increase the probability that only the most robust and exciting science gets published in the journals. A scientist or group of scientists writes a paper, and then submits it to a journal. The editor at that journal reads it and decides if it is worthy for review. If it is, the editor obtains 2-4 reviewers to look at the paper. Each reviewer spends hours looking at the paper and searching for the tiniest flaw. They are also asked to rank the importance of the work (more subjective than answering the question was the work done soundly).

The editor reads the reviews of the papers and decides if it should be rejected, accepted, or to ask the authors for a revision that will be reviewed again. If one of the later two decisions is made, the paper and the anonymous reviews are passed back to the author who is invited to re-write the paper. This is a painstaking process but it does lead to a high degree of certainty that work is done well before it is published.