pardon me, I have a frog in my throat...

So a bit of a precursor here. My sister is a geek. She choked on her coffee when she answered the phone to do this interview, and ended up having a tickle in her throat for the duration of the interview. She made a funny about it, and ended up being the 'Mystery Clip' for the day, where you could identify her and win a prize. My beloved Alberta-born Canadian-prairie worshipping sister who fantasizes about owning land in Saskatchewan was apparently identified as, "The southerner who studies frogs..." Here's the transcript. I left the misspelling of her name, because it makes me laugh. HAHA on you Danna!


Detroit Zoo Tests Northern Frogs for Disease

CBC Special Report, Thursday, August 16, 2007, 6:40 a.m.

RANDY HENDERSON, CBC: Well for most people it wouldn’t be unusual to never see a frog or a toad here in the NWT considering there are only 11 recorded species in the entire territory, but Dana Shock isn’t most people. The newest curator of amphibians for the Detroit Zoo spent three weeks this summer traipsing around the ponds and slews of the Sahtu and the Dehcho. She’s catching, collecting and swabbing these slimy little creatures and testing them for disease hoping it might give her a clue about what could be killing thousands of frogs around the world. Dana joins us on the line from Detroit, Michigan. Good morning.

SHOCK: Good morning.

CBC: So what are you looking for exactly?

SHOCK: Well as far as disease we’re looking specifically for two kinds of pathogens that have been implicated with amphibian declines elsewhere in the world. One of them is a virus called the rana (?) virus and it’s been found everywhere. It’s one of those kinds of things of seek and yee shall find, but we don’t understand its ecology very well. The other one is a fungus. Some of your listeners might have heard of chytrid fungus or BD (?) as we affectionately call it and it’s actually been implicated with declines all across the tropics, especially down in…(inaudible)…along Central America. It’s kind of been likened to a lightening bolt just shooting down through Central America. It’s wreaking havoc.

CBC: So why are you looking up here, you know, when we have so few frogs and toads?

SHOCK: It’s a great place actually to look for all sorts of things and one of the big reasons to go and study amphibians up in the North is because unlike in tropics or some places in Panama where there might be 60 or 70 species of frogs all in, like, a kilometre. Up in the North it’s a little bit less complicated because there are fewer species. So what we can do is we can go up there and we can get a really good idea about how the system is working there in something that’s much more traceable, take what we learn and apply it elsewhere. The other thing that’s really great about working in the North is that a lot of the species that are up there, they’re right at the edge of their range so they’re very sensitive to slight changes in their environment because they’re right on their physiological edge of where they can even be. So it’s just a lot of really great reasons to just go up there and chase frogs.

CBC: What is it about frogs that make them such a good barometer as to how polluted the world is becoming?

SHOCK: Well there’s a lot of great reasons to study amphibians and some of them are more sort of ethical kind of reasons, they’re an important part of sort of our biodiversity legacy that we leave for future generations. There’s about 6,000 species of amphibians on earth and about 2,000 of them are facing extinction. They’re listed by the IUCN (?) as threatened or more. So there’s a third of the species of amphibians that are in trouble, but why else? They’re really good barometers because they play a really critical role in the ecosystem and one of the things that I like to tell people that they might not have thought about is that because of the life cycle of amphibians they play this incredibly important connection between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. So if you think about a tadpole, it grows up in its pond and its eating algae and it’s doing all sorts of really fun little tadpole things and then it metamorphoses and goes on up into land…pardon me…I have a frog in my throat this morning…

---Laughter

CBC: You have a frog in your throat, yeah, well that’s part of the hazards of the trade I guess.

SHOCK: Apparently it is.

CBC: Let me just ask you while you’re catching your breath there, how much of a concern are these pathogens that you were talking about for us and for our frogs here in the NWT?

SHOCK: Well the species that are in the NWT, especially things like the boreal toad, their declines are linked with these same pathogens further south in their range. So one of the species that’s of great concern is the boreal toad, I think some people sometimes call it a western toad as well and they’re actually really, really in trouble further south in Colorado, Wyoming, those kinds of places. They’re just red listed, they’re not doing very well at all, but the species makes it up into the Northwest Territories and so the kinds of things that are affecting amphibians further south definitely have the potential to attack the amphibians in the North.

CBC: Did you see anything else that surprised you up here?

SHOCK: Well, surprise, we’ve got some great pictures of these spotted wood frogs. Wood frogs have a distribution across North America, which is very interesting in and of itself, but up there in the North you kind of have this colourful version of wood frogs that they’re very spotted and speckled and you just don’t find those down south. They’re beautiful. So I was a little surprised. I’d seen pictures, but to have them in the hands was really something else.

CBC: These are the frogs, correct me if I’m wrong, that freeze solid in the winter?

SHOCK: They do indeed, they do indeed. In fact, two of the species in the North there freeze solid.

CBC: What about the other ones though? We’ve heard about these ones, but ones that don’t freeze solid, how do they keep from freezing when its 40 below?

SHOCK: They go very far down into the ground. They try and get down below the frost line. They also are very good in a sense that the ones that don’t do it don’t survive I guess, but they find hibernacula. So these are sort of little pockets in the surface of the earth where they get down and just for whatever reason there’s geothermal activity or whatever, there’s not as much freezing and it’s the same kinds of things that allow them to persist in high elevation areas as well.

CBC: So, Dana, what are you going to be doing now with all the data that you’ve collected here in the North?

SHOCK: Oh my goodness, well the first thing that I’m doing is I’m compiling and analyzing all of this sort of basic natural history data that I collected. So the size of the animals, what stage of development they were at when I was in these different sites and comparing those kinds of parameters to what we find further south in their range, just kind of getting an idea of what’s going on where. In addition, as you mentioned in the intro, I was also taking swabs and small tissue samples. So phase two of this all is going through and using a PCR (?) based diagnostics, some of your listeners might not know that, some of them will, what I’m doing is I’m looking at the DNA that I got off these animals and seeing if there’s…(inaudible)…of those pathogens are in there, if there’s rana viruses or chytrid fungus.

CBC: Do you have any of our northern frogs now on display at the Detroit Zoo?

SHOCK: We have species that are found in the North. I back myself up, we don’t have a wood frog on display right now, but we do in fact have wood frogs here in Detroit.

CBC: Oh, okay.

SHOCK: Yeah, when I talk about a very widespread species, wood frogs are unparalleled. They actually go all the way up to the Beaufort Sea.

CBC: Alright. Well with that, Dana, thank you so much for joining us. I’m a little wiser now as to our amphibians here north of 60. Very interesting talking with you.

SHOCK: I sure enjoyed the opportunity. Thank you so much.

CBC: Alright, take care.

SHOCK: Bye bye.

CBC: Bye bye. That was Dana Shock and she’s the curator of amphibians for the Detroit Zoo.

Comments

Babzy said…
I am very impressed with your sister's work. Of course frogs make the connection between land and water. I'd never thought of that before.

It's no surprise to me that these animals are dying from some kind of virus or fungus. Warmer temperatures promote growth of bugs and disease. Even humans are plagued with super bugs that we have never had before. And look at the pine beetle infestation destroying our forests. The winters are not cold enough now to kill the beetles off. WE'RE DOOMED!!

This is a very interesting post. Thank you for writing it out for us. I'm going to tell Lin as she has a special love for frogs, snakes, lizards, etc.
ticblog said…
Funny you should mention the pine beetles, Babzy. I was actually quite astonished at the toll they have taken on the landscape. I have pink-tinted sunglasses, which did a very effective job of making the reddish-brown of the dead trees stand out, since in the bright sun without the aid of a filter they often look almost the sme as the green ones. Rose-coloured glasses don't always make things prettier. There's a bunch of crown land right behind my uncle and auntie's place up in Murch Lake; the farmers have managed to contain and/or minimize the toll the beetles have taken on their trees, but the government has done nothing to stop the infection on their trees. How long should the residents be expected to to pick up the tab for the government slacking off? And of course, the flip side of that argument is, the pesticides they have to use kill the beetles, kills other stuff, too. What a mess.
Babzy said…
They won't use pesticides. The people won't let them. There would be hell to pay. What they are doing is burning some areas, creating a barren circle around areas so the beetle can't spread anymore. They're harvesting half dead trees, getting rid of the beetle within those trees (that must be where they will use pesticides and treat the lumber).

They also have this strange method of using pheremones to attract the beetles to one area then contain them.

The govt claims it will take decades to get rid of them. I don't have a good feeling about this. We have a major rainforest here. There is no question the beetle problem AND the methods to get rid of them is going to cause even MORE GLOBAL WARMING. Some days I can't stand it.
fmartell2 said…
Dana is so cool!!! Just like her sister!
Everytime I look at our Salamander I think of her... lmao!

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