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 ...

A cat-eyed snake eats a toad in Panama. Many snakes depend on amphibians and their eggs for nutrition. Karen Warkentin Tropical snakes are masters of disguise, skillfully camouflaged and capable of ...

Amphibian biologists from around the world watched in horror in 2004, as the frogs of El Copé, Panama, began dying by the thousands. The culprit: Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a deadly fungus more ...

The ecologist Karen Lips observed frogs for several years in Central America. She left briefly, and when she returned, the frogs were gone. She sets out to find them and encounters a horrible truth.

It was December of 1996 when Karen Lips turned up the first bodies—and finally felt an ember of hope. As a graduate student working in the muggy forests of Central America, she’d noticed that an ...

Karen Lips, an amphibian ecologist and tropical biologist, is an associate professor at the University of Maryland in College Park. She contributed this article to LiveScience's Subscribe to read this ...

Karen Lips has never forgotten the silence. It was the early 1990s; she was finishing her PhD in tropical biology, and had come back to a research site in Costa Rica, a protected reserve high up in ...

A fungus that has eradicated more than 100 frog species across the globe has spread to an ecosystem in Panama that researchers hoped might hold out from infection a while longer. "The findings are a ...