Green-eyed tree frog
Frogs are born with legs that are good for hopping and special pads on their toes to help them climb. In comparison, toads have shorter legs, drier skin, and are less likely to live near water. Most frogs and toads are responsible for controlling the Earth's insect population, since their diet consists mostly of insects and spiders. However, the green eyed-tree frog is also a carnivore. As a tadpole, the frogs mostly consume algae and plants. Frogs have a moist and permeable skin layer covered with mucous glands, which enables them to breathe through their skin, not just their lungs. The layer of mucus that covers them also acts as a shield, protecting them from scratches. The reason frogs have large and protruding eyes is to make up for their lack of a neck. This eye feature allows them to see everything around them. The color scheme of the green-eyed tree frog is to camouflage them from predators. Frogs with bright colors are alerting predators of their poisonous nature.
Karen Lips
Following her PhD, Lips became an Assistant Professor at St. Lawrence University between 1995 and 1998. In that position, she returned to Costa Rica in 1996 and observed the overall abundance of frogs in the region was down 90%. Her observations echoed those documented at a number of other ecological sites where amphibians were mysteriously dying off over the previous 15 years. While some of the population decline could be attributed to habitat destruction, the areas Lips was researching were untouched and relatively unexplored environments. She moved her field research site to Fortuna, Costa Rica where she and her colleagues, including Rick Speare, found dead and dying frogs. They collected 50 dead frogs to send back to a veterinary pathologist in Maryland, who discovered that a protozoan of some sort had infiltrated their skin. With a team of collaborators, the protozoan was eventually identified as "Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis", or "Bd", which belongs to a phylum of fungus called chytrids. Amphibians drink and breathe by absorbing water and oxygen through their skin, but chytrids grow all over their bodies and interfere with their blood chemistry, leading to organ failure and eventual death. Since "Bd" was identified, it's been implicated in the collapse or extinction of over 200 amphibian species.