An Interview with Dr. Chris Raxworthy,Curator of Frogs: A Chorus of Colors

1. Why do you like herpetology? What is your interest in this particular subject?

Well I think the first thing is I've been interested in herpetology since I was a little boy. At four years old I was drawing pictures of frogs and toads and newts and salamanders but if you ask a four year old why you like these animals, I don't think you'd get a very detailed response, and the truth is that even now I can't really tell you why. It's like such a sort of a natural passion, they're just really cool, interesting animals, and I just have a natural curiousity, that I'm always driven to want to find out more about them. That's, I think, the "why" question.

2. So you were interested in science as a child. Did you admire any scientists while you were growing up?

Well good science—I've always loved science, in terms of thinking about questions, how is it something works, why is something this way, but dealing with individuals probably the most powerful person growing up that I came across was Charles Darwin. So you know, thinking about natural selection-we're taught it in schools, or university, so hopefully it's all very intuitive and obvious, and yet when you understand the fact that people in Charles Darwin's time and also his time, people had a very completely different perspective about how the diversity of life on Earth developed, and where it came from, it's really awe inspiring to think that these are the first people who came up with this very creative new perspective, so that had an impression on me. But something else that I think is a very interesting point, when I was growing up I always thought that I was sort of perhaps born in the wrong time, that the age of discovery was over, you know, all the exotic parts of the world had been heavily explored, all the animals had been found and described. And thinking wow, wouldn't it have been great to have been born two or three hundred years ago. And yet now the scientists, and of course when I finally got the chance to do research myself, I realized how little we still know about the world. So there are still all sorts of exciting unexplored parts of the world to go to, and that most of the interesting questions that you can start probing or asking about animals and plants are still unanswered, and in fact one of the messages I'd like to get across to younger people is, you might get the impression we have this tremendous knowledge base, but any kind of inquisitiveness and interest that you have you're going to find that you can make a big contribution in that area, there's still so much more to discover. So don't think about the world these days as overstudied, it's anything but overstudied.

3. What exhibitions or exhibits have you worked on here at the Museum, if any?

I've worked on the Hall of Ocean Life, which you know oceans has really nothing to do with amphibians, frogs, although there's one frog which is featured in that hall which lives in brackish water. But I was involved in the sea snakes and the sea turtles, which were a common theme in that hall, so I was involved in making sure that the models looked lifelike. And with sea snakes it's really fun, because you know these are underwater snakes that most people aren't that familiar with, and of course the sea turtles, they're so interesting and cool anyway that they always seem to have a big appeal. With other exhibitions, probably it's been on the edges of things like Amphibians and Reptiles, our hall which opened to the public in 1978. I've been involved in some maintenance issues with that hall as well, it's actually the only other major hall or exhibition that I've become involved in.

4. What do you enjoy most about being a scientist here at the Museum? What do you enjoy most about the Museum itself?

I think the most enjoyable part about being a researcher at the Museum is just that wonderful climate every day when you come in to work and you think, wow, how lucky I am to be here, and this is like a dream job. So you always have that excitement, you're never quite sure how the day's going to work out. Some of the days might be dealing with predictable things, but then you can get phone calls or people asking questions or an issue comes up, or you might get an email from say, Madagascar, from one of your students overseas about an issue or someone appling for an intern all summer, Then of course there's research involved so I'm allowed to ask general questions and that means writing, and analyzing data, and designing experiments, and observing. So it's a very dynamic, fluid environment to be in. And of course it's also great to be surrounded by wonderful colleagues, people that are always there to either bounce ideas off or interact with, and also the Museum community which is very supportive, I think that's probably most important of all, feeling that I'm in an institution that really appreciates what you're doing. It's a wonderful feeling.

5. Tell us a bit about the research you do here. Why is it important to you?

The main value to me of research is when the research goes well, you have that satisfying feeling that in an area you've identified you're making some progress, you're getting some new insights. It gets back to that question about why are you doing science in the first place, and you have that natural curiousity and so you want to satisfy it. And you know when you're really doing good research work when you realize that you are actually satisfying your curiousity, usually you answer one question that raises a whole bunch of new questions but that in itself is interesting and good. But I was particularly pleased recently when we were using computers and geographic information systems, old museum records that date back more than 100 years, and very modern remote sensing stations online? bring all that information together and actually being able to tell an interesting story and get new perspectives about the distribution of reptiles in Madagascar. And the reason that was of interest to me was that you could actually test the predictions that the computer was generating with real data, and get a feeling for how good we were at making predictions on the presence and absence of species. And it was also very satisfying, we got into the 88.1% ability of correct predictions. And what that offers, which was fully exciting to me, was the prospect that we could actually use this technology to help design better reserves in the future. So that means in terms of making conservation decisions where we could preserve, what forests do we pick, now we have a new emerging technology that could actually fast-track our ability to come up with smarter conservation decisions. So that was something very recently that I remember getting a big buzz out of.

6. If people could take away just one important point about the Frogs exhibition, or about frogs in general, what would you want that to be?

I think it would be you probably knew a lot less about frogs coming into the exhibition than you know now, and the reason I say that is that most of us are familiar with local frogs, and if you grew up in North America, or in any temperate area of the world, you'd be familiar with big, sort of green and brown frogs, and they go into ponds and lay eggs, and leave the eggs, and the eggs turn into tadpoles, and the tadpoles metamorphose into frogs. Which is absolutely true, but it's only a tiny fraction of what frogs really do, particularly in the tropics. So in the tropics frogs are smaller, they're often brightly colored, and they do all sorts of weird and wonderful things in terms of guarding their eggs, parental care, carrying tadpoles on their backs, laying eggs on their backs and absorbing them and the babies hatching out of their backs…they also can do some really bizarre things, there are some species where one of the parents will actually eat the eggs, and the eggs either develop in the stomach or in the vocal sacs, and then the adult actually spits up the babies. There are some frogs that don't have tadpoles; the baby frogs actually develop all contained within inside the eggs. And just the sheer diversity of forms of frogs as well: you get tiny things, you get hairy frogs, you get giant goliath frogs, you've got frogs that are on ?, frogs that are in deserts, frogs that spend all their time up in trees. So there's so much more about frogs than most of us are aware, and I'm really hoping that this exhibition will really open people's eyes to all this great diversity of lifestyles, life history, body form?, that actually exists out there.

7. What's your favorite fact about frogs and why?

That's a tough question, but I think probably one of the funnest facts about frogs is really the fact that there is this diversity of reproductive modes, and some of it is so weird and strange that it almost defies explanation. I was just watching some video footage of a frog giving birth to a baby frog, and there are some frogs which actually retain the eggs inside them, and the eggs are fertilized internally, and the eggs actually develop, a bit like a pregnancy in a mammal, and seeing this video clip of a frog actually giving birth to a baby frog that was just absolutely mindblowing to me, I mean it's something that as a biologist you might be familiar with seeing with the mammals, but to see that with a frog, that was truly spectacular.

8. What projects are you working on now? Do you have plans to contribute to any exhibitions in the future?

Certainly for exhibitions in the future we've got all sorts of exciting ideas. We first of all want to see what the reaction is to Frogs, we're hoping that people are going to really love it. And Butterflies has been really popular and now it comes back seasonally, perhaps in the future the Frogs show although it's a temporary exhibition, could come back on a seasonal basis. So that's one option, which is that perhaps the Frogs will make a return appearance. And another time I'd love to see us featuring other amphibian and reptile groups here. That might actually be interesting. More generally reptiles are so radically different to frogs, in so many different ways, that it would be really fun to actually showcase what reptiles do. And the fact that we've got that birds aren't just a subset of reptiles, that's I think still something which is not well understood or broadcast to a broad base of the public area, and fundamentally reptiles are still poorly understood by most people, so we've got some fun things we can talk about like tortoises, and crocodiles, and recent discoveries, breakthroughs that we've made in reptile biology, so it would be really fun to showcase some of that.

9. Is it generally accepted that a new virus is causing the deformed frogs and amphibian declines worldwide, or might there be other causes?

There's a big raging debate right now about deformed frogs and it's a very complicated issue. One of the problems is that you will always get, regardless of human factors, through natural developmental problems, you'll get some deformed froglets being produced, that is always a background issue about the deformities. But in terms of what's actually causing the deformities, there have been suggestions. They might be cysts, from parasites, in this case these are not deformities?, but they're actually, I believe, fungal or a bacterial pathogen. There's also been an issue about developmental pathways being disrupted by chemicals in the environment, things from past herbicides?, or pesticides, and there's been some concern about increasing ultraviolet light, UVB, from destruction of the ozone layer. And certain things like ultraviolet light that can also cause abnormalities in development. So the likelihood is, it's going to be a complex array of different factors, often these work punitively, unfortunately in a negative fashion, so they can actually create a more magnified effect. But at the moment we don't have a very clear-cut, simple answer to that question.