“Amphibian Apocalypse”

Hi, I’m John Rafferty, I am the editor for Earth Sciences at Encyclopaedia Britannica. In this episode, we will explore one of the world’s most serious environmental issues, an issue that is affecting the planet’s amphibians—amphibians make up the class of vertebrate animals that includes frogs, toads, newts, salamanders, and caecilians—and more specifically, this issue is responsible for the rapid losses of amphibian populations worldwide.

The cause of these declines is an invasive fungal pathogen called Batrachochytrium dendrobatedis (Bd for short). Today, we will explore its direct effects on amphibians and its indirect effects on other animals with the help of amphibian expert Dr. Karen Lips.
She provides an insightful look into the origins of Bd, how Bd infects amphibians, how science is treating the infection, and some of the things that you and I can do to keep the problem from expanding. And should you miss something in this podcast, please know that you can find it again our website.

RAFFERTY:
Dr. Karen Lips is a professor of biology at the university of Maryland in College Park.

DR. KAREN LIPPS:
Most of my career, I've worked in Latin America, studying amphibians and reptiles, especially the role of disease on their population biology. There's a fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatedis and way back when, when I was a grad student, I found a bunch of dead and dying frogs, and we used that to identify the cause of death from this fungus. And that was when we described the fungus with several other groups as a global pathogen that was killing frogs all around the world.

INTRODUCTION
Amphibians should be familiar to you. They are vertebrate animals characterized by their ability to exploit both aquatic and terrestrial environments. The name amphibian, derived from the Greek amphibios meaning “living a double life,” reflects this dual life strategy—though, in reality, some species live on land full-time, while others spend their whole lives in the water.

More than 8,100 species of living amphibians are known. First appearing about 340 million years ago, they were one of the earliest groups to branch off from the fishes during the evolution of animals. These days, amphibians are represented by frogs and toads (order Anura), newts and salamanders (order Caudata), and caecilians (order Gymnophiona). These three orders are thought to derive from a single radiation of ancient amphibians, and although they are different in body form, they are probably the closest relatives to one another. Frogs and toads are more widespread, more diverse, and more numerous than either salamanders or caecilians, and they have a broader range of specialization in locomotion, feeding, and reproduction. This range is shown in their ability to adapt to many different environments and lifestyles. Beyond being specialized for leaping, many frogs and toads have developed structures that allow them to burrow into the ground or climb trees.

All caecilians, except for a few aquatic species, live underground and have specialized structures that help them thrive there. They have a wormlike appearance, with compact and bony heads in which the bones have fused to provide a long, spade-like braincase. Salamanders are less specialized in than the other two orders in terms of body structure. They have small heads and long slender bodies made up of four limbs and a tail.

All amphibians rely on their skin to breathe to at least some extent--and their circulatory and respiratory systems work with the skin to provide cutaneous respiration. A broad network of capillaries in the skin allow for gas exchange and the diffusion of water and ions between the animal and the environment. Several species of salamanders and at least one species of frog are even lungless.

With such a reliance on the skin for breathing, skin diseases—such as BD---can be serious.

DR. KAREN LIPPS:
So, this, this fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatedis, which scientists, we usually just call it BD or chytrid. This chydrid fungus has a life cycle that has two main life stages. One is a very small zoospore. So, it looks a little bit like a sperm or a tadpole, So, it's got a little tail, and it swims around in water or a water film, and it searches for amphibians (frogs or salamanders). And when it finds one, this little sperm or tadpole looking zoospore burrows into the skin of the amphibian, drops that tail, and then morphs into something called a zoosporangium.

So, the zoosporangium is this round-shaped container in the outer part of the skin of a frog, and inside that zoosporangium grows more zoospores. And when they are mature, the zoosporangium has a little exit tube and those, those zoospores leave the zoosporangium, swim out into the environment, where they look for another frog, and so, a frog gets infected with the zoospore. And given enough time in the right conditions, that zoospore will multiply and can eventually fill the skin of a frog—so much so that the frog or the salamander has a problem getting enough oxygen or getting enough water, because amphibians use their skin to get rid of carbon dioxide and pick up oxygen and also pick up water. So, at a very high intensity of infection, this fungus can kill an amphibian.

RAFFERTY:
What can you tell us about how the disease originated and how far it has spread throughout the globe?

DR. KAREN LIPPS:
What we know about this fungus—and now we know that there's actually a variety of genotypes, that is, very similar, but genetically distinct, forms of this fungus—and it seems that the, these chytrid fungi have originated somewhere in Asia. We don't know exactly where people are out there tracking down wild chytrid in parts of Asia to find the ancestor to all these different types of chytrid. But it seems that maybe sometime in the past 50 to 150 years, this, these chytrid fungi were exported out of this place in Asia, probably through the pet trade or the food trade, the live animal trade, and they have spread to all parts of the world. So today, chytrid fungi, these pathogens of amphibians, can be found on all the major continents, except for the North and South Pole and for a few oceanic islands. But essentially the entire world now has these chytrid fungi present.

RAFFERTY:
I read a few years ago that there may have been a—the origin may have been on the Korean peninsula. Is that a contention, is that now out of favor, or are there other areas that they're considering as well?

DR. KAREN LIPPS:
No, I mean, I say Asia only because I don't know that we have the exact oldest form that's been collected, but, but you're right. You know, currently somewhere near Korea, China, somewhere in there is where we have the oldest version, but that part of the world is where we're finding the greatest diversity of chytrid. So, every time people go back out and make more cultures from frogs, they're finding more and more types of, of these chytrid fungi. So yeah, currently Korea seems to be the origin, but there's a lot of places that have yet to be surveyed, but it seems that somewhere in that region seems to be the origin for these amphibian chytrid pathogens.

RAFFERTY:
Are there any current cures or treatments for frogs and other amphibians that pick up this disease? Is there anything that we can do once a frog, or another amphibian, is infected?

DR. KAREN LIPPS:
For frogs and salamanders in captivity, it's quite easy and straightforward to cure them of a chytrid infection. We have a variety of antifungal medicine. So, basically you make a little bath of antifungal chemicals, and you put your live amphibian that has an infection in there, and that antifungal treatment will get rid of the fungus.
So, this is being done with many species all around the world, especially in places like zoos and aquariums, where they're constantly getting infections from chytrid. It’s pretty easy to treat. But the problem has always been is how do you treat wild populations? Because you can't really fly over and spray some terrible antifungal treatment, because there's an awful lot of good fungi out there that we need to break down wood and leaf litter and serve a whole bunch of other roles. So, it's the wild populations where we do not have a cure for them. There's no way to actually treat them, but in captivity, it's very easy.

RAFFERTY
Are there any estimates as to how many species have gone extinct as a direct result of the fungus?

DR. KAREN LIPPS:
Yeah, there's been a recent survey, where Ben Shiel,, a scientist from Australia, gathered together dozens of amphibian experts and basically asked them, you guys were the people who saw amphibians decline in your areas or study these regions. What can you say about the status of amphibians relative to the invasive chytrid who had fungus? And in that survey what they found was that something like at least 500 species of amphibians have been affected by this chytrid fungus and have declined in some amount. At least 90 species, they estimated, have gone extinct from this chytrid fungus. And we emphasize that these are very big numbers. We have a lot of confidence in these numbers, but surely this is an underestimate, because chytrid was circulating in amphibians before we knew it was out there. And so, there's probably a lot of species that were affected that disappeared before we even knew what was happening

RAFFERTY
In your research, have you found any evidence that the effects of the disease have gone beyond amphibians, especially in ecosystems in which they appear? Is there a wider spread of the effect, or the impact, of the fungal pathogen on the greater ecosystem?

DR. KAREN LIPPS:
Definitely. The impact of chytrid has been most obvious on the amphibians, but we ourselves have done a couple of big studies in Panama, where we were in the position to predict that this chytrid was coming. We set out a series of experiments studying the ecosystem in a site in central Panama before the chytrid got there.

So, we had pre-decline data and post-decline data and could actually compare not only what the impact of chytrid was on the amphibians at this site, but also the effects on the tadpoles that lived in the streams, the stream ecosystem—everything from the algae, the small invertebrates that live in the stream, the water quality, the amount of algae and detritus that builds up in these streams when the tadpoles and the frogs disappear.

We just had a big paper that came out related to that study showing that the predators of the amphibians, the snakes in this case, have also suffered pretty, pretty dramatic changes. So, in the tropics, just as we have an incredible diversity of amphibians, there's a pretty incredible diversity of snakes, as well. And many of these snakes are obligates, that is, they require frogs. That's their only food, or in some cases they only feed on frog eggs. And so, when all those amphibians, all those frogs, disappeared and went away more or less permanently, the snakes that relied on those frogs for food were impacted as well. And so, in our paper, we describe that many of these snakes showed evidence of starvation: they got very skinny right after the frogs disappeared. Many species, we show, also became very difficult to find. Previously they were fairly abundant, but after the frogs disappeared, we couldn't find many species of snakes either. And so, the entire snake community also became reduced and less diverse than it was before the frogs disappeared.

So, we suspect that there are probably many other implications that have not been studied. For example, so many insects are food for those amphibians, and it's likely that when the amphibians disappeared, terrestrial, these little insects were probably also affected, because their predators disappeared. So, that's something that's going to require some additional work.

RAFFERTY:
When it comes to the snake community, you've got probably a range of different species. Some are more general than others in terms of their diet. And so, your primary—you have documented the decline in the snake species primarily among specialist species?

DR. KAREN LIPPS:
That's a good question. It's true that many of the snakes that specialize in frogs disappeared, but there were others that have certainly changed, in terms of their abundance. They're harder to find. And it turns out that many tropical snakes, like the ones that we studied, they're what we consider a generalist, that is, they kind of eat whatever they can find. So, they lizards eat small frogs and maybe no large invertebrates, or, you know, maybe even small mammals. And so, some of these animals are generalist enough that when the frogs left and were no longer an option for them, they could have switched to other things. So, we suspect that, yeah, the specialists were the ones that were most affected, but even some of the generalists were affected, because they were—frogs were a big part of their diet. But it turns out that we actually don't know a lot about snake diets, and so it's pretty obvious from our work that we need a lot more information on what snakes truly eat in the tropics and how specialized some of these things are.

RAFFERTY:
I was wondering—my last question here today—and thank you very much for your time—is wondering if there's anything that you and I, and other people listening to the podcast, can do to prevent or slow the spread of the disease?
Is there anything that we can do on this, or is this already out there, and we just have to wait for the dust to settle for the frogs and other amphibians to reconstitute their populations to evolve a way out of it?

DR. KAREN LIPPS:
Well, it is unfortunate that chytrid--the sort of the most invasive form of this chytrid—is present all around the world today, so that's a story that's a little bit too late for us to do much about. However, we have learned in the past 20 or 30 years that there are several other genotypes, several other forms of the chytrid, that differ just enough genetically that they would also be a threat to our native biodiversity. So, while we do have chytrid here in the U S., we only have one type of it present in our wild amphibians. So, it's very important then that we do not do things that would add to the number of chytrids that are invasive here in the U S. So, that means that if you buy a pet frog or a pet salamander, you do not want to ever release that into the wild, even if you, even if it seems healthy. You never want to release your pets into the wild, because they might have a new type of disease, maybe disease completely different than chytrid.

Amphibians worldwide are under threat from Bd and other pathogens. I hope that you were able to learn a little bit more about amphibians and their predicament in this episode, and that you gained an appreciation for some of the challenges this fungus poses to amphibians, the ecosystems that support them, and the efforts of scientists in their quest to understand it.

Don’t forget, you can catch up on anything you might have missed on Britannica.com. Learn more about extinction and its causes from our article located at 64.176.36.150/science/extinction-biology.

There you can also find other parts of this podcast series. More information on Bd, frogs, salamanders, and other amphibians can be found at 64.176.36.150.

Amphibian Apocalypse. Story by: John Rafferty. Produced by: Kurt Heintz. A special thanks to Dr. Karen Lips of the University of Maryland for her contributions to this episode. This is the eighth part of the “Postcards from the 6th Mass Extinction” series. This program is copyrighted by Encyclopaedia Britannica Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.