Vance Vredenburg, a biology professor at San Francisco State University, is trying to save the Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog from a deadly fungal disease that has been devastating amphibian populations around the world. In Tuesday’s Science Times, Erica Rex reports on Dr. Vredenburg’s efforts to inoculate wild frogs with an experimental bacteria treatment in Dusy Basin, in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
Over the last decade, disaster has struck in the form of chytridiomycosis, or chytrid, a deadly fungal disease that has driven at least 200 of the world’s 6,700 amphibian species to extinction. One third of the world’s frogs, toads and salamanders are threatened. Forty percent are declining. Chytrid’s arrival has laid waste to the indigenous Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog, Rana sierrae.
In Dusy Basin, a remote glacial valley in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks a few miles west of Bishop Pass, Vance Vredenburg, a professor of biology at San Francisco State University, is conducting an experiment he hopes will help preserve what remains of these once abundant creatures. Dr. Vredenburg and his colleagues are inoculating chytrid-infected frogs with a bacteria, Janthinobacterium lividum, or J. liv, that does not prevent infection with chytrid but can help frogs survive.
Why did he start researching Sierra frogs in the mid-1990s?
Anand Varma Vance Vredenburg of San Francisco State University releasing a Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog.He chose frogs as research subjects because he wanted to do “basic science that could be applied toward solving some real-world problems, like the biodiversity crisis. Once your study animals start dying, believe me, you pay attention!” At the time, he said, “I saw many scientists as living and working in a bubble. Besides,” he added, “I like catching frogs.”