Snakes suffered after a frog-killing fungus wiped out their food
Karen Lips knew a wave of frog death was coming. The frog-killing Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or chytrid, fungus had begun ravaging amphibian populations in Costa Rica in the early 1990s, and by all indications would eventually reach Panama. So in 1997 Lips, a herpetologist now at the University of Maryland in College Park, and her colleagues scrambled to take stock of the biodiversity at El Copé, a tropical forest field site in central Panama, before the wave hit. Chytrid did hit El Copé in 2004, eliminating more than 75 percent of the frog population there. But Lips and her colleagues’ foresight allowed them also to assess chytrid’s impact on another part of that ecosystem — snakes. These elusive frog-eating reptiles can be difficult to detect. Still, the team found that both snake diversity and average body size dipped after chytrid wiped out the frogs, a major food source, researchers report in the Feb. 14 Science. “When there’s a collapse [like that in frogs after chytrid], the focus is usually...