Hundreds of endangered Green and Golden Bell frogs huddle inside a sauna, protected from Sydney's winter chill. The sauna -– a small greenhouse containing ten black-painted bricks -- may offer a pleasant warmth, but it also protects the frogs from a deadly fungus called chytrid that would otherwise drive them to extinction.
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00:00These rare frogs have been saved from a flesh-eating fungus by cozying up in makeshift saunas.
00:07Chytrid, a deadly waterborne pathogen, has swept the globe,
00:11decimated frog species and threatens to wipe out even more amphibians.
00:16The research here is primarily focused on green and golden bell frogs.
00:19And it's been hammered, just like a lot of Australian frogs.
00:22Once chytrid arrived, they just, population by population, began to blink out.
00:27Anthony Waddell, a biologist at Sydney's Macquarie University,
00:31says his team has found a simple solution,
00:34at least for the local green and golden bell frogs.
00:37Here we're exploiting the Achilles heel of the fungus.
00:40It can't tolerate high temperatures or even moderately warm temperatures.
00:43The innovation is very simple.
00:45It's just a pile of masonry bricks that we painted black
00:48and we put inside a little vegetable greenhouse.
00:51The whole thing costs about $70 to build.
00:54So in our experiments we found that about three times out of four
00:57when we went out to catch them and look at them,
01:00they were in the thermal shelters, the bricks.
01:03It can be almost 15 degrees Celsius warmer inside the shelters,
01:07which can stave off the chytrid.
01:09Frogs play a vital part in the environment and are known as bioindicators,
01:13which are used to assess how healthy an ecosystem is.
01:16Without them, entire ecosystems can collapse.
01:20We know in areas where frogs have declined due to chytrid,
01:24human diseases can increase.
01:26Frogs are excellent predators of insects, including mosquitoes,
01:29and they vector a lot of human diseases.
01:32But globally, 41% of frog species are threatened with extinction,
01:36according to a recent study by the International Union for Conservation of Nature,
01:41making them one of the most vulnerable invertebrate groups.
01:45The chytrid has caused six extinctions just in Australia.
01:48We have frogs that only live in glass boxes now.
01:51So getting them back in the wild is the goal.
01:53So all of my research is focused on that.
01:55While right now it's going to impact this one endangered species,
01:58I'm hoping and I will expand it to other species that we think will benefit.
02:05But this one is turning the colors.
02:08It's their namesake. He really is green and gold.