Fighting a fatal fungus

There is an international pandemic killing off millions of amphibians, and university biology professor Karen Lips is trying to save them.

Lips and her colleagues discovered an unusual fungus called Chytridiomycosis that thrives in cold, moist environments and infects the skin of amphibians, killing them by hampering their ability to absorb both oxygen and water. The effect on international ecosystems has been drastic, Lips said, and while she's not optimistic about finding a cure for the fungus, she is trying to develop a better understanding of "chytrid" to better predict where it will hit next.

Lips began to notice things going wrong while doing graduate research with the University of Miami in the Costa Rican mountains in the early 1990s. Lips went to the Central American cloud forests - wooded areas high enough to be continuously shrouded in mist - during the summer to catalog amphibians, especially frogs, which are easier to find than salamanders and other creatures that live underground. She and two of her colleagues discovered four or five new species; several years later, though, she began to notice changes.

"Before, we'd find 20 species and 100 animals in a night," she said. "We came back and we'd find four in a week. ... How does everything look the same, except you lose 40 species essentially overnight?"

She returned to the United States to find that other places, including the National Zoo in Washington, were having similar problems.

"They said, 'We've got frogs with something weird in their skin,' and I came back and said, 'I've got frogs with something weird in their skin,'" Lips said.

After further research, Lips realized the chytrid fungus that she first encountered in Central America was responsible for the damage to the amphibians' natural environment. At least 2,500 species of the 6,300 currently known frog species are "endangered or declining" because of the fungus, Lips said, and the pace of extinction is rapidly increasing.

"That's 100 species in 20 years," she said. "Before that it was like, two."

But while Lips, who came to the university in January and will start teaching in the fall, is working with researchers to try and understand the fungus and how it spreads, she says a cure for the malady is still far off. While affected creatures can be cured in captivity with a chemical wash, returning them to their indigenous environments means the animals will just contract the fungus again.

"Everywhere we look, we find it," Lips said. "Asia is pretty clean, but North America, Central America, South America - they're wiped out."

And though scientists are considering genetic engineering as an answer, all they can do now is treat the amphibians in captivity or hope they develop an immunity to the fungus.

"We can't do anything," she said.

Though Lips has been working with frogs for two decades, she wasn't always so specific in her field of study - while pursuing her undergraduate degree at the University of South Florida, she knew she wanted to work with animals, but that was all.

"I didn't know I could be a biologist," she said. "I was going to be a vet, but then I got a job making double the minimum wage catching turtles and I said, 'This is the life for me.'"

Lips said her research is moving out of Central America and becoming more focused on the U.S., specifically the already-affected Appalachian Mountains. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park that straddles the border between Tennessee and North Carolina will be the first site she tackles.

Though there is evidence the fungus has already passed through the Appalachian Mountains, its harsh seasonal climates keep the fungus from growing year-round and give amphibians a chance to bounce back in the winter and summer, she said.

Yet while Lips isn't giving up on the fight for the frogs, student say the problem may not draw the attention of too many people.

"I mean, if I had to pick a cause to fight for, this probably wouldn't be too high on the list," sophomore sociology major Sophie Kieffer said. "I mean, not that it's not important, but if I had to choose between saving the frogs and feeding the children, I would choose the children over the frogs. People would probably care if it started affecting people, though."

But even without an onslaught of public support, Lips isn't giving up.

"People might say, 'Oh, it's frogs; they're nice, but what does it have to do with me?,'" Lips said. "But they eat a lot of insects, insects that carry a lot of diseases. And amphibians aren't that far away from mammals. If all the dogs and horses and monkeys and cattle were dropping dead, people would be screaming."

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