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In Hopes Of Halting Deadly Fungus, Scientists Give Toads A Bath

A fungus is killing off Boreal toads, a type of toad specifically adapted to high-altitude life in the southern Rocky Mountains.
Courtesy of Tim Korpita
A fungus is killing off Boreal toads, a type of toad specifically adapted to high-altitude life in the southern Rocky Mountains.

There’s a fungus wiping out a special kind of toad that lives in the Rocky Mountains, but scientists may have a solution: a probiotic skin soak.

The boreal toad is a tough little animal, with a lifespan longer than a decade, about half of which is spent buried underneath a thick layer of snow high up in the mountains.

“They’re really impressive little guys,” says Tim Korpeta, a graduate student in biology at the University of Colorado Boulder who has recently embodied another title: toad-bather.

He and colleagues with the university and Colorado Parks and Wildlife spent last summer soaking tadpoles in a purple probiotic juice dubbed ‘Purple Rain’ that appears to help the animals keep the deadly fungus at bay.

“We just put them in a bucket with a bunch of bacteria. The probiotic we’re using produces a bright purple pigment, hence the name ‘Purple Rain,’” says Korpita. “They swim around in there for a day and bacteria get on their skin, hopefully providing some protection against the pathogen.”

Initial findings showed that bathing late-stage tadpoles did the trick, keeping good bacteria thriving on the animals’ skin.

Korpita and his colleagues will be at it again this summer, washing toads raised in captivity before sending them out into the wild to, they hope, repopulate areas that are now toad-less.

This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUER in Salt Lake City and KRCC and KUNC in Colorado. 

Copyright 2021 KUNC. To see more, visit KUNC.

Rae Ellen Bichell is a reporter for NPR's Science Desk. She first came to NPR in 2013 as a Kroc fellow and has since reported Web and radio stories on biomedical research, global health, and basic science. She won a 2016 Michael E. DeBakey Journalism Award from the Foundation for Biomedical Research. After graduating from Yale University, she spent two years in Helsinki, Finland, as a freelance reporter and Fulbright grantee.
Rae Ellen Bichell
I cover the Rocky Mountain West, with a focus on land and water management, growth in the expanding west, issues facing the rural west, and western culture and heritage. I joined KUNC in January 2018 as part of a new regional collaboration between stations in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Utah and Wyoming. Please send along your thoughts/ideas/questions!

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