Karen Lips, University of Maryland in College Park
Date: 30 May 2013 Time: 04:08 PM ET
Karen Lips, an amphibian ecologist and tropical biologist, is an associate professor at the University of Maryland in College Park. She contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights
It was a dark and steamy night and clouds of insects were biting our faces and hands as we carefully examined a tiny emerald glass frog. I was with my team of researchers in the middle of the jungle in the mountains of Panama. We were standing on slippery rocks in the middle of a stream doing our annual census of amphibians and reptiles in Parque Nacional Omar Torrijos. Every year since 1998, we've been following individually marked frogs to see how long they live, where they live, and how many frogs are in this population.
We used to spend hours every night capturing and marking dozens of these glass frogs, but in 2004, a pathogenic fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) invaded this site and wiped out hundreds and hundreds of amphibians.
The emerald glass frog survived, but it is much less abundant today and it takes us only an hour to run the same transect. Because we marked animals before the epidemic and after the epidemic, we can compare how many infected frogs live as long as uninfected frogs. This can tell us why some populations persist, but are not recovering; it tells us why some populations continue to decline; and it can tell us how fast or slow those populations are changing. It might help us figure out whether the problem is the death of adults, or lack of survival in young stages, and it can help identify habitats where populations are improving and places where they are doing worse.
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