Karen Lips: Where policy meets science

Herpetologist Dr. Karen Lips refused the revolver the cattle farmer offered into her hands. There was really no need for the gun. She came to Costa Rica to catch frogs, not kill jaguars.

It was 1989, and frog collection was supposed to be an easy practice. Unlike those in North America, frogs in the jungle don’t bolt when they are plucked from the leaves of trees or off of the lush forest floor. Like tiny colorful jewels, they embed themselves in nature and resign their beauty to scientific study when they are found. So why were Lips and other scientists around the world who studied amphibians having trouble locating their frogs?

“We didn't know if there was a pattern in terms of a habitat, or the species affected what the cause was—nothing. All we knew was there were maybe five to ten random places on the planet where they could not find frogs anymore,” Lips said.

Amongst undisturbed forest and at 1900 meters elevation, Lips called a wooden shack in Costa Rica home. Secluded from civilization, she sometimes rode into town with her only distant neighbors—a family who ran cattle and spoke no English. Her best teachers were Ernest Hemingway and “The Little Prince.” Word by word, she spent rainy afternoons translating the Spanish texts so, at the least, she could understand the family’s warnings that “El Tigre”—the panther—was lurking in the area.

“You're in the middle of nowhere, so you don't expect anything to happen to the animals or the plants because there's a small farm. You're surrounded by old growth forest at the top of the mountain. And in 1993 my frogs disappeared,” she said.

It wasn’t Lips’ first experience with vanishing frogs; her younger brother set loose an American Southern Toad she stored in a shoebox as a five-year-old growing up in Jensen Beach, Florida. Needless to say, this was on a much larger scale.

Her test subjects having deserted the region, Lips headed over to Western Panama a couple of years later in 1993 where, along with some semblance of civilization, a horrific scene awaited her.

“Frogs are dead and dying. We see one, we grab one and it dies in our hands,” Lips said. “Frogs are sort of all splayed out with their glands exuding the poison, I mean clearly these animals were in trauma. They were dying while we watched.”

Puzzled, Lips sent samples back to the University of Maryland where she now had her PhD, a job as a professor, and a lab of her own. The test results were inconclusive. Whatever was killing the frogs was novel.

Dr. Ana V. Longo, an assistant professor of biology at University of Florida who worked at the Lips’ lab from 2014 to 2018 as a postdoctoral researcher, saw Lips’ concern firsthand at a conference in Puerto Rico. As an undergraduate, she was fascinated by this new issue posed to the herpetology community.

“I mean this is something that affects all over the world [sic]. Karen was the first one to notice and put things together, but basically this is repeated through Australia, California—because that's where it started...All of the sudden everything was a global problem,” Longo said.

It wasn’t until a New York Times article was published on the issue that the Smithsonian National Zoo reached out to say they noticed the exact same effects in their frogs. Not only that, but they had answers.

Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, also called chytrid or Bd, was the name given to the parasitic fungus that had ravaged frog populations around the world. Knowing that Bd had already spread to three continents, Lips headed back into Panama to try to get ahead of the disease.

“Here I am, watching frogs die before my very eyes,” she thought.

Her and her team of graduate and undergraduate students marked trails and sectioned off streams in El Cope, the base of a mountain chain in Panama that they knew was the last sector to contain certain species of frogs.

“I always joke that she knows how to move in those streams without falling,” Longo said. “She's like a ballet dancer in those streams. She never fell off all the time [sic] that we were wet and falling.”

The next step was stopping the spread, which took Lips out of the field and into the rooms of government agencies and with policy makers. It was in this new phase of her career that she met Peter Jenkins, a lawyer at Defenders of Wildlife who had contacts at the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS).

“He knows a lot of the biology of the issue and what he said is ‘Well this is pretty obvious. What we should do is petition The Fish and Wildlife Service under the Lacey Act to prevent the import of injurious amphibians,’ ” Lips said.

While USFWS couldn’t technically list the disease as injurious under the Lacey Act at the time, they could prohibit the import of amphibians that carried chytrid.

However, the department stalled on passing that resolution in 2009. USFWS reasoned that since the disease was already global, there was nothing they, as a U.S. agency, could do. It was Lips’ first taste of bureaucratic frustration, but she decided it wouldn't be her last.

“And that's where I sort of had to learn—well, what is it that I ask them for? What is the ask?” she said.

After publishing a groundbreaking paper in the Journal Science in 2014 that explained the extent of Bd and its mutation Bsal, which affects salamanders, Lips once again marched into the USFWS, armed with her paper in hand to prompt further action.

Officials were so moved by her urgency that they began work on legislation the next day—a virtual feat for a government agency.

Today, Longo continues the groundwork laid by Lips in her own lab where she researches lesser-known species of salamanders in Florida.

“Now we're looking at species that have declined all over the place in the state of Florida and Georgia too, and it seems that they are super susceptible to Bd and both Bsal as well [sic],” Longo said.

Although it took a year to implement, USFWS eventually passed a rule that, to this day, prevents the importation of 201 species of salamander that could potentially carry Bsal into the United States.

Recognizing the importance of using her science to influence policy, Lips has sought more ways to examine the intersection between the two disciplines. She implemented weeklong training sessions at the University of Maryland for graduate and postdoctoral students on how to talk to the media and communicate scientific research to effect policy. And in 2016, Lips spent a year at the Department of State as a Jefferson Science Fellow learning how international science policy is conducted.

“A lot of it for me is about disease and food where biodiversity really impinges on national security issues. You want to make sure you have a secure food supply, you want to make sure you can handle emerging diseases, outbreaks of all sorts, so we're trying to find a way to find some research to bring people in and really explore what that might look like,” she said.