Hustling for funds to get back to Panama

The frog extinctions were starting to generate professional and public interest. Matt published results from his Panama studies done on the trips before ours in a very high profile, non-technical, ecological journal (the publicity magazine for the Ecological Society of America) and other more specialized papers from the group were coming out in the peer reviewed literature. Meanwhile Karen and Matt were receiving numerous invitations to speak at universities across the country where they would tell the story of the disappearing frogs of Panama and how the effects of these extinctions were reverberating through the ecosystems.

The research group also continued to make presentations at scientific meetings. Such meetings are great places to share scientific ideas and results with hundreds of others who are working on related issues. They provide the one time where scientific specialists are not the oddballs; nerd talk is the norm.

Matt and I attend a meeting of stream scientists every year and room together. Rooming with me may not be the most pleasant experience, but it is one way we could both use our grant money more efficiently. The day starts at 8:00 with scientific presentations till 5:00. Dinner is followed by a boisterous mixer in the meeting hall with hundreds of people discussing and arguing science. As with any large group of talking people, the volume increases to a roar. This makes for a long day, and after this Matt and I would lie in our beds and talk about science, our colleagues, and the state of the world.

Often our conversations would turn to the frogs in Panama. We kept trying to think of ways to strengthen the research. As in all science, every experiment leads to more experiments. In addition, the impending extinction of the frogs was something to worry about, even if we could do nothing to stop it. One thing we learned early on from rooming together at meetings, earplugs are essential.

One of the gaps in our research after our trip to Panama, and an issue Matt and the rest of us worried about for the next proposal, was measuring how much nitrogen is excreted by tadpoles. The tadpoles could be what we refer to as “ecosystem engineers”. Ecosystem engineers are organisms that have a disproportionately large effect on the environment and this effect cascades to the other species. Beavers that fill valleys with their dams, hippopotami grazing in fields and bringing nutrients they excrete back to the water, alligators digging water holes in the Everglades that last through the dry season, and bison eating dead grass and recycling the nutrients locked up in the grass available for the new growth of grass, are all examples of ecosystem engineers.

The tadpoles at El Valle were abundant and active enough that they could be major nutrient contributors to their streams. We were concerned with what happens when these potential ecosystem engineers in streams are lost. Some species of the tadpoles break down the organic material that falls into the stream in the form of leaves, and others clean the algae off the rocks. An interesting feedback is that the leaves become better to eat and the algae grow better when supplied with nitrogen. The tadpoles excrete nitrogen, and it actually stimulates production of their food. This excretion may also stimulate the microbes that serve as the food source for many of the tadpoles, insect larvae, shrimps, and fish in the stream. There were so many tadpoles in the streams that their effect had to be large, but how large was what we wanted to know.

Nitrogen excretion measurements were made while we were in the field with live tadpoles collected directly from the stream. The animals were placed in test tubes and then removed and released back into the stream. The amount of ammonia (the form of nitrogen excreted by the tadpoles) left after the tadpoles were removed was used to estimate the rate of their excretion. We did quite a few of these experiments streamside on the first trip with the samples returned to our rooms in Hotel Campestre for late night analyses. Our initial experiments indicated the rates of excretion were very high over the first few minutes and then decreased over time.

Bob argued that the tadpoles quit eating when they were placed in the experimental tubes and their excretion rates were slowing after a few minutes because of that. Alex and I thought that maybe stress was causing them to excrete more at the beginning of the experiment. Matt, being the diplomatic group leader, and a fine scientist to boot, suggested experiments were needed to settle the argument. This is the scientific processes. Our speculations formed hypotheses and now we needed the experiments to test them.

These discussions led Matt and Alex to run a series of experiments on tadpoles from the Midwestern US that are taxonomically-related to the tadpoles dominant at Rio Maria. These experiments proved that the higher excretion rates at the beginning were from the stress of being handled and put into a tube. Excretion rates from later in the experiment were more applicable to what the tadpoles were doing in the stream. Matt and Alex proved that handling tadpoles and putting them in large test tubes literally scared the piss out of them. These results were written up and submitted for publication in the scientific literature. They also strengthened the next proposal and would guide our experiments if we got funded to go back to Panama.

Another five months went by and the proposal was rejected again. This was extremely disheartening because once again, the reviews were fabulous. Matt called the program officers at the National Science Foundation to try to figure out how to get the proposal funded. The funding situation was getting dire because Piet’s and several graduate students’ salary depended upon continued funding.

We had agreed to fund the follow-up experiments in Panama out of our own pockets if need be, but we could not expect post-doctoral researchers or graduate students already living on poverty-level salaries to do the same. Luckily the program directors at the National Science Foundation agreed to some stop-gap funding to keep the project going and allow Matt time to apply for funding in the next round. One of the investigators on the grant actually paid Piet’s salary out of her personal funds for awhile. Scientists generally don’t enter the field of ecology to get rich, and many are quite generous with their time and resources, but this was exceptional. There is a long tradition of using personal funds for research; Charles Darwin had to pay his own way as naturalist on the Beagle.

Scientists through the years have had to scrape for external funding and we were no exception. Matt and the rest of us had to strategize on how to make the proposal sexy, compelling, and stress how imperative it was to fund the research immediately. We needed to write the proposal so well that the agency simply could not justify declining to fund it. Matt worked with the group on the best way to sell the research, and the proposal was submitted yet again.

The third time was a charm. I received an email from Matt telling me to plan to travel to Panama the following February. This was very good news and just in the nick of time. Matt had scouted out one site not far from the other side of Panama City where there were still frogs and additional experiments could be conducted as part of this new grant. If the disease spread much further into Panama the work would be finished for good. The remote Darien rainforest between Panama City and Columbia presumably contains the last areas the disease has not reached, but the eastern part of it is inhabited by drug runners and rebels and is not a safe place to work without an entire protective army. Going to the Darien was out of the question; we had a hard enough time getting funding, but getting support for a private protective army was out of the realm of possibility.

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.