Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - January/February 2012 - (Page 38)

exploring career options Wildlife Biologist Brian Gratwicke, PhD Wildlife Biologist, Center for Species Survival, Smithsonian National Zoological Park Interview by Amy Entwisle Why did you decide to work with amphibians? Amphibians are some of the most accessible forms of wildlife on the planet. Kids tend to love them. Parents like them because they’re not especially dangerous for kids to play with. But amphibians also have an intrinsic value of their own. They’re incredible little jewels with important ecosystem functions. They eat an enormous number of invertebrates, including pests that spread human pathogens and attack crops. There are chemicals in their skin that help them fight pathogens and diseases, chemicals that may be used to help develop medicines and cures for humans. Amphibians are the sound of the rainforest at night. They are the wildlife in your own garden, but they’re disappearing from ecosystems all over the world. They helped to greatly enrich my childhood, and I think it would be a shame if that piece were missing from the childhoods of our children, or our children’s children. Zimbabwe, where Brian Gratwicke grew up, is a land synonymous with elephants, lions, and giraffes, but it was the aquatic life that got the young Gratwicke’s attention. Here, he explains how he turned his fascination into a career, and how he uses that career to help preserve the nature that he loves. How did you become interested in biology? I always knew I wanted to be a biologist. As a kid, I would go down to the public pond at the bottom of our street, catch little minnows, and put them in jars all over my bedroom. Eventually, I had 20 fish tanks lining my bedroom, I had dug up my mother’s garden, and I had eight fish ponds. What are you working on now? How did you parlay that interest into a career? I got my undergraduate degree in zoology and my master’s in fisheries ecology. Then, as a Rhodes Scholar at oxford, I did a PhD on coral reef fishes in the British Virgin Islands. Afterward, I knew that I didn’t want to be an academic, per se, the kind that focuses exclusively on making observations and testing hypotheses. I wanted to use my personal values to guide my conservation actions. I’m working on a novel disease that was actually discovered here at the National Zoo by one of our pathologists who was trying to identify what was killing some frogs in an exhibit. It’s called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or amphibian chytrid fungus, and it’s causing massive amphibian declines and extinctions. It’s now moving through latin America, wiping out frogs along the way. Panama was the last latin American country to be hit by this chytrid wave, but there are still some populations of frogs there that haven’t been affected. I’m working there to try to stop it. What was your first job after grad school? After I finished my PhD, I got a job with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation working as a grant administrator for Save the Tiger Fund. What I really learned there was that my training as a biologist didn’t give me all the tools I needed to be a conservationist. I was well prepared for species and habitat management, yet poorly equipped to raise money and hire staff to implement a conservation program. Conservation financing, land acquisition, policy, and education are some of the key areas in which conservation biologists work in order to save species or ecosystems. You’re helping create what’s been called a Noah’s Ark for frogs whose population is threatened by chytrid fungus. Can you talk a little bit about that? At the Smithsonian, we’re working with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on the Amphibian Ark Program, a global project to create assurance colonies of amphibians that will otherwise go extinct in the next few years. We’ve put those frogs most urgently at risk of extinction in a captive breeding facility where we can keep the fungus out. We can cure chytrid fungus in frogs in captivity by using anti-fungal chemicals, 38 imagine Jan/Feb 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - January/February 2012

Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - January/February 2012
Contents
Big Picture
In My Own Words
Reading Tea Leaves
iGEM: Synthetic Biology, Brick by Brick
Young Biologists, Big Discoveries
My Journey to the International Biology Olympiad
Lab Notes
Macro Menagerie
My Summer at SIMR
Selected Opportunities & Resources
The World on Stage
Lessons from Chess
Off the Shelf
Word Wise
Exploring Career Options
One Step Ahead
Planning Ahead for College
Students Review
Creative Minds Imagine
Mark Your Calendar
Knossos Games

Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - January/February 2012