Speaker: Timothy Korpita
Topic: Sunday Science: Current Research on saving the Boreal Toad in Colorado

Bio: Tim Korpita is a PhD candidate in the McKenzie Lab in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He studies the way microbial communities interact with their hosts, in a variety of systems, and tries to develop conservation tools that incorporate recent advances in microbiome science. In Colorado, he has been working with the endangered boreal toad and has participated in efforts to restore the toad to their natural place in mountain wetlands. For the last few years, the majority of this work has taken place in the drainages in the west of Chaffee County.

Summary: Boreal Toads are a high elevation amphibian species that were formerly common across the mountains of Colorado. The last few decades have seen a precipitous decline in Boreal Toad populations all over the southern rocky mountains, mainly due to a recently emerged fungal pathogen. The McKenzie Lab at CU Boulder has been developing a probiotic treatment that uses naturally occurring skin bacteria to help the toads to fight off the pathogen. The last few years have seen field trials of these treatments on toad populations in Chaffee County. This talk will touch on the pathogen and its impact on our boreal toads, the science behind probiotic treatments and what we have learned from the recent field trials, and the future of toads in Colorado.

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