INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE (Paris, France) 06 June 06 Racing a deadly fungus, scientists bag hundreds of frogs (Brenda Goodman, The New York Times)
Atlanta: Of all the things that airport security screeners have discovered as they rifle through travelers' luggage, the suitcases full of frogs probably were a first. In a race to save amphibians threatened by an encroaching, lethal fungus, two conservationists from Atlanta recently packed their carry-ons with frogs rescued from a Central American rain forest - squeezing about 150 to a suitcase - and asked the airline for permission to travel with them in the cabin of the plane.
The frogs, swaddled in damp moss in vented plastic deli containers large enough for a small fruit salad, are perhaps the last of their kind, collected from a pristine national park that fills the bowl of El Valle, an inactive volcano in Panama.
In many parts of the world, loss of habitat is thought to be the biggest reason for amphibian extinctions, but the frogs in El Valle are facing a more insidious threat. A waterborne form of chytrid fungus is moving down the spine of the mountain range where they live.
Scientists are not exactly sure how the fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, kills, but it seems to break down a protein in a frog's skin, called keratin, that may be important for respiration. The skin of an infected animal sloughs off in layers, and within two weeks the animal dies.
The chytrid fungus is thought to play a large role in the worldwide disappearance of amphibians, a trend that is terrifying experts, who say it would be the first loss of an entire taxonomic class since the dinosaurs.
Joseph Mendelson, curator of herpetology at Zoo Atlanta, who has discovered about 50 new species of frogs only to watch half of them become extinct in the last 15 years from the fungus, was tired of watching helplessly as salamanders, newts and frogs were eradicated from one patch of forest after another.
With the help of new data published Feb. 28 in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Karen Lips, a zoologist at Southern Illinois University who spent years tracking the chytrid fungus, scientists were able to predict where it would next strike.
"When you can make predictions with respect to catastrophic population declines and extinctions, we all agreed you have a moral and ethical responsibility to do something about it," Mendelson said.
Lips called Mendelson and Ron Gagliardo, the amphibian conservation coordinator at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, because the men have a reputation for being especially good at catching and taking care of frogs, and proposed an idea that would seem reckless to most biologists.
She wanted them to collect as many frogs of as many different species as they could and move them out of El Valle before the virus hit. She estimated they had only weeks to carry out the mass frog evacuation.
"We are going to overcollect hundreds of animals," Mendelson said. "That flies in the face of all conservation logic."
There was no time to do the meticulous studies of behavior, reproduction, eating habits and habitat that zoologists try to conduct before moving any endangered species from its natural environment.
There was not even time to figure out where to keep the hundreds of frogs they would collect.
"Years and years of work go into moving one species out of the environment," Mendelson said. "We decided that can't happen. There's no time for that. We had to figure out what could be done quickly and, of course, legally."
They went into the forest at night, because most frogs are nocturnal, slogging down a river in hip waders and carrying powerful flashlights. After four separate trips, some lasting only 48 hours, the two men, along with a native guide who was stealthy and had quick reflexes, managed to gather 600 frogs.
They tried to get 20 males and 20 females of each species to ensure good genetic variation in the breeding colonies.
To feed them, they rented a house and left piles of rotting fruit in the corners to attract flies. "It was pretty stinky," Gagliardo said.
Then there were those trips through airport security.
A guard in the Panama City airport was not satisfied with the letters of explanation that the biologists presented, even though they included permission from the Panamanian government to collect the frogs.
He had them open a container that held the Michael Jordan of jumpers, a species the biologists like to call rocket frogs.
"I open it and, sure enough, the frog goes bing!" Mendelson said.
Fortunately, Gagliardo caught the frog before it landed on anyone in the amazed crowd that had gathered around to watch.
Many of the species they brought home to their respective institutions in Atlanta had never before been kept in captivity.
But Gagliardo, who has been bringing frogs home since he was 4 years old, has developed a fine touch for their husbandry and for recreating environments in which they can thrive and breed.
He quickly realized, for example, that a translucent species of frog collected from a cloud forest was not breeding because it needed, well, clouds.
With a misting humidifier that he bought on eBay and some plastic pipe, Gagliardo filled the frogs' glass tank with a steady wisp of white water vapor. Once the tank, which sits in a corner of a behind-the-scenes room at Zoo Atlanta, was bubbling over with a creeping mist, like a witch's caldron, tadpoles followed in short order.
"It's a bit of a Noah's Ark, in some ways," Gagliardo said. "But it gives these species that are predicted to go a new lease on life."
Not all experts, it should be noted, are fans of what has come to be called the rapid response protocol.
David Wake, an integrative biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said the strategy felt too much like triage.
"I am alarmed at the apparent disappearance of so many amphibians in Central America," Wake said. "But if the situation is so bad, then much organized thought should be given to a plan for captive breeding that is not responsive to emergencies only, but that looks at all amphibians worldwide to decide where limited funds would be best spent."
Not all species are equally valuable, he noted, and not all are equally at risk.
Still, in an apparent validation of their tactics, Mendelson said the chytrid fungus recently was found in El Valle, as predicted, and he estimated that 90 percent of the frogs there would be gone within 90 days.
"You won't hear scientists say this too often," Mendelson said. "But I wish we were wrong."
Racing a deadly fungus, scientists bag hundreds of frogs