Infectious Disease Symposium Update

Well, the SUNY ESF & SUNY Upstate Infectious Disease Symposium: From Lab to Landscape was a great success! Drs. Sadie Ryan and Anna Stewart Ibarra did a fantastic job organizing, and gave interesting talks on their innovative research with malaria and dengue fever. Recent publications on these topics can be found here and here. Click here for a list of other speakers and topics. I am also proud to say that The Amphibian Ranavirus Project poster (below)  received a 1st place award at the symposium poster session, with another lab member, Michael Jones, receiving a 3rd place award for his poster presenting his research with the Emerald Ash Borer. Molecular work with 2011 and 2012 samples continues, and I am hoping to have some prevalence results by the start of this field season, to be presented at the 2014 Northeast Fish and Wildlife Conference in Portland, Maine.

Infectious Disease Symposium at SUNY ESF

The Amphibian Ranavirus Project is about to debut its first poster! I will be presenting at the SUNY ESF & SUNY Upstate Medical U Infectious Disease Symposium "From Lab to Lanscape: Integrated Infectious Disease Research", taking place at the SUNY ESF Gateway Building Jan 24 from 8-5. Details can be found HERE.

Submitted abstract:

Emerging infectious diseases have been implicated as contributing factors to recent amphibian population declines. One such disease reaching pandemic status is ranavirus, caused by a group of viruses documented in fish, reptile, and amphibian species on five continents. Mortality rates exceed 90% at the larval stage of many aquatic-breeding amphibian species, including the common frog (Rana temporaria) in the UK, tiger salamander (Ambystoma tigrinum) in Western US, and wood frog (Lithobates sylvaticus) in Northeastern US.

            As part of a long-term wetland restoration ecological study beginning in 2010, The Upper Susquehanna Coalition in collaboration with SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry created a network of 71 hydrologically isolated pools incorporating four pre-existing pools at Svend O. Heiberg Memorial Forest in Tully, New York. One target species of the restoration, the wood frog, experienced local die-offs of tadpoles in three pond sites in 2011, and preliminary testing using polymerase chain reaction assay verified the presence of ranavirus in all three sites. Two die-offs of wood frog and green frog tadpoles have since been observed in other sites, with ranavirus confirmation pending.

            To identify environmental and organismal factors influencing susceptibility to ranaviral infection at these sites, we are collecting ongoing data on tadpole populations, environmental conditions, water quality, and ranavirus prevalence both during and between epidemics. We will use general linear models to determine which biotic and/or abiotic variables are most influential in ranavirus outbreaks, to develop a predictive model that can be applied to other landscapes. This will be especially applicable to future wetland restoration endeavors, as the Heiberg system incorporates both natural and constructed ponds and offers a unique opportunity to comparatively analyze disease outbreaks in each.

 

Prep for the 2014 field season is underway!

I am proud to say I am now officially a Master's student, and the Ranavirus Project is back in full swing out of The Ryan Lab at SUNY ESF: http://sadieryan.weebly.com

Modeling disease transmission is a tricky business, and there are literally hundreds of input variables. I will be focusing on a few major factors, one being temperature. Any #SciFund Ranavirus Project supporters out there should be pleased to know that a portion of your support allowed us to buy these nifty little things:

This is an iButton, and when coated with waterproof plastic and submerged in a pool it will log temperature data every 3 hours for up to 7 months. Good stuff.

Stay tuned, pictures and reports from the field coming up!

-Tess

End of field season

Wood frog sampling for 2012 has come to a close, and thanks to Jim I have a few hundred more samples to process! :)

As of now I am working full time so the lab work is horribly slow, but with some potential extra hands in the lab things should be up and running soon.

Pond 8 wood frog update

It is with a heavy heart that i report the five wood frog tadpoles from pool 8 have all died over a period of three days. They were all in Gosner stages 42-44. Cause of death yet to be determined...

Way to go!

THANK YOU to everyone who helped fund The Amphibian Ranavirus Project for success in the #SciFund challenge! We are fully funded with three days still left, and can move forward with some pretty awesome research! Thank you to week 3 fuelers Christine Brant, Megan Knight, Jimmy McCarthy, Heather Holmes, Lee Figueroa, Mike Simonovich, Jackie Daemion, Sharon Baisley, Tom Beauvais, and Jacqueline Lu!

Field update

The 2013 field season is underway, with most of this year's wood frog clutches hatched! Congrats to all the little wood frogs that managed to escape last year's green frog tadpoles. For those who don't know, green frog tadpoles overwinter in the ponds that don't dry out during any given year, and by the time next year's wood frog egg masses are deposited, the green frogs have grown into some massively large tadpoles with equally large appetites! Wood frog eggs are a perfectly bite-sized nutritionally rich meal for these predators.

However, last week during a routine water level check, Jim found a bunch of dead, decomposing green frog tadpoles and two adult green frogs in one of the forest pools. This pool was extremely healthy and productive last year, and located far away from any of the ranavirus (RV) infected pools.  Furthermore, it is very early in the season to be seeing anything like this yet! The carcasses were too decomposed for RV sampling and testing, so this week I went out and collected 5 live green frog tadpoles to test for RV.  If it's there, that means these guys survived the outbreak and could provide evidence for green frogs as vectors.

Here's a video of the pool, Pond 8A. This is one of the isolated pools - the video starts at the trail turnoff, about 100 meters from the service road leading to the forest pools. This is just to illustrate how isolated this pool is, and to give a sense of our day-to-day field treks (this is one of the short ones). I am no videographer and the beginning is very Blair Witch-y, so if you get motion sick I might suggest skipping to 1:15. At about 1:28-1:34 you can get a good sense of the canopy cover for this time of year. This is one of the pools that is in at least partial sun all season. at 1:36 keep an eye out at the bottom of the screen for a darting green frog tadpole. It stops toward the middle of the screen, so you should still be able to see it and get a sense of how big it is. At this stage they are about 6-8 cm (~2.5-3 in) long - WAY bigger than the 1-1.5 cm wood frog tadpoles in this pond.

Speaking of wood frogs, I found some of those alive too! This means if there was a RV outbreak, they either survived with a sub-clinical infection or are still at such an early development stage that they are not yet susceptible due to a changing immune system. I captured five of them via dip-netting, and am raising them in the lab until they are big enough to test for RV. This way I can track their development stages as they grow and answer a couple questions: 1) Are they already infected, but not yet susceptible? If so, then they may die of RV once they reach a certain stage. 2) Did they manage to avoid becoming infected? They are too far along to have still been embryos when the outbreak occurred, so maybe the pool sustained a low enough viral load that they weren't infected. 3) Did they become infected, but for some reason these individuals are more resistant? If so, they may survive until metamorphosis but still test positive for RV.  Stay tuned for the start of sampling next week, including a demonstration of the pipe sampling technique.