Deformed Frogs Form When Parasites And Pesticides Combine

The research includes the first experimental studies of amphibian deformities conducted in ponds where the animals live. The discoveries, which show the effect of environmental stress on disease outbreaks, may help to explain how disease affects the distribution, growth, development, and survival of frogs, which have been disappearing during recent years at alarming rates worldwide.

"It is not uncommon now for 20 to 30 percent of the frogs at many locations to have limb deformities," says Joseph Kiesecker, an assistant professor of biology at Penn State and the leader of the research team. Since the early 1990s, when school children and amateur naturalists first began finding frogs with deformed legs in U. S. wetlands, scientists have been trying to determine the reason for the problem's escalating occurrence. These deformities in frogs have a chilling resemblance to the deformities in human caused decades ago by the drug Thalidomide. "Both the general public and scientists suspect that whatever is causing these problems in frogs may also cause harm to humans," Kiesecker says.

A decade of scientific research has resulted in two prominent hypotheses about the causes of frog deformities: one is that they are caused by human-induced contamination of the frogs' environment with chemicals like pesticides, and the other is that they are caused by a common naturally-occurring parasite, the trematode worm. Scientists had found evidence to support each hypothesis, but the research results were not conclusive enough to resolve the controversy. "More rigorously designed experiments were required to determine which factor is more important and how these two factors work together," Kiesecker explains.

Kiesecker's breakthrough was in designing a study that combined field experiments at the ponds where the frogs live with experiments in the laboratory. "The kind of field experiments that we did in this study have never been done before," Kiesecker says. The Kiesecker team collected tadpoles from ponds in Centre County, Pennsylvania, then used some of those tadpoles in a series of laboratory experiments and some in a series of field experiments conducted in six ponds within the same region. Half of the ponds receive runoff from agricultural fields and contain detectable levels of pesticides, and half are free of pesticides and agricultural runoff.

The Kiesecker team designed the experiments to test four key hypotheses regarding the relationship between pesticides, trematode parasites, and limb deformities in frogs. The first hypothesis was that limb deformities occur in frogs that are infected with the trematode parasite. Trematode parasites inhabit a series of host species during their life cycle, including pond snails. When they leave the snail, in the form of trematode larvae called cercariae, they swim around in the pond in search of a tadpole, which is the next host they need to invade in order to survive. The researchers placed groups of their tadpoles in the six ponds within two kinds of enclosures located side-by-side--one with a fine screen that prevented the trematode larvae from entering the enclosure, and the other with a larger-mesh screen that allowed the trematode larvae to infect the tadpoles.

"These same trematode larvae cause "swimmer's itch," which is a common problem among people who swim in lakes in this part of the country," Kiesecker says, explaining that the swimmer's immune system eventually kicks the larvae out, leaving just an annoying rash. "A more serious problem for people occurs in tropical climates, where trematodes cause an infection known as Schistosomiasis that kills millions of people every year."

The only tadpoles that developed limb deformities in the first experiment were from cages that were exposed to the trematode larvae, while tadpoles in cages that protected them from the larvae did not get any limb deformities. "We learned from the first field experiment that tadpoles have to be exposed to trematode infection for limb deformities to develop," Kiesecker explains.

The second hypothesis the team tested is that limb deformities in trematode-infected tadpoles are affected by pesticides. When they analyzed the rates of limb deformities among their research animals, they found much higher rates of deformities in trematode-infected tadpoles at the three ponds that receive agricultural runoff and contain pesticides than in the ponds that do not.

The team then moved into the lab to test their third hypothesis, which is that pestici