Where did the frog go when he was sick?

ARF Operations Manager John-Paul McFadden joins Deborah Pergolotti (far right) and researchers from Taronga Zoo, Sydney to collect sample frogspawn from Machans Beach, Cairns

To the Cairns Frog Hospital of course.

No joke – Cairns has a frog hospital. Since opening in 1998 over 2,000 sick frogs have passed through its’ doors.

Deborah Pergolotti is the curator of the hospital and facilitator of the Frog Decline Reversal Project which as well as caring for these sick and injured amphibians is collaborating with CSIRO Livestock Industries’ Australian Animal Health Laboratory (AAHL) in Geelong, Sydney’s Taronga Zoo and James Cook University (JCU) to combine their research expertise and technologies to diagnose new frog diseases detected recently by the FDR project.

Funded by the Australian Government Department of the Environment and Water Resources, the three-year project was initiated by Ms Pergolotti.

“Since we began rescue and rehabilitation activities in 1998, we have discovered several new and undescribed disease issues in Far North Queensland amphibians including high levels of cancer, and die-offs and malformations in frogs and cane toads,” Ms Pergolotti said.

According to AAHL’s principal frog researcher, Dr Alex Hyatt, these diseases, or syndromes, have never been seen before and may present a threat to the long-term survival of native frogs.

Frogs with specific syndromes will be screened by veterinary pathologists from AAHL, the JCU’s Anton Breinl Centre and Taronga Zoo’s Australian Registry of Wildlife Health (ARWH) to identify what pathogens are present, if they are infectious, and which are responsible for death and deformity.

JCU’s Professor Rick Speare said the Project’s integration of specialist skills and equipment will avoid unnecessary duplication and should provide a cost-effective procedure for identifying new frog diseases.

Collectively the project will pioneer a new national way of handling diseases from the wild which, if proven successful, could be used as a model to initiate a broader diagnostic network in Australia for other wildlife.

Dr Hyatt said the new amphibian syndromes emerging in Far North Queensland are not the first diseases to have threatened Australia’s frog populations. “In the late 1990s, Australian scientists discovered a debilitating frog fungus called Chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis), which has been responsible for species extinctions and local population losses around the globe. Our experience with the Chytrid fungus taught us that if you find a disease or virus early enough you have a much better chance of controlling it,” he said.