One of six to earn national award SIUC zoologist Karen Lips tracks
frog fungus CARBONDALE, Ill. -Karen Lips, a zoologist on Southern Illinois University's Carbondale campus, has won a prestigious award for her work to preserve the Earth's biological diversity. A herpetologist, Lips belongs to a kind of "biological SWAT team" that's scrambling to discover the causes of frog die-offs in seemingly pristine cloud forests of Central America and elsewhere in the world. This month she became one of six researchers to win 1998 Biodiversity Leadership Awards. The others hail from Zimbabwe, Bolivia and other parts of the United States. Awards are made by the New York-based Bay Foundation and Josephine Bay Paul and C. Michael Paul Foundation, in collaboration with ten leading research institutions-including Harvard and Yale universities. Recipients each receive $180,000, paid out over three years, beginning in 1999. Winners were announced at an Oct. 5 ceremony in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In scientific circles, Lips is known for helping detect a previously unknown fungus that appears to be a contributor to some frog declines. She'll use her award to finance response team work that may help reverse amphibian fatalities. Team colleagues include a toxicologist, pathologist and endocrinologist. Lips says the loss of frogs has frightening implications for the rest of the world. "Certainly in the tropics there are lots of diseases carried by insects. And frogs eat insects. If there are no frogs, there's an increased potential for more insect-borne diseases." "But the really big thing we should be concerned about is the whole functioning of the ecosystem. If you think about how many frogs live in an area, and then they all die, the creatures that used to eat them-snakes, birds and mammals-are going to have problems. And if there aren't any tadpoles, there could be changes in streams and lakes, like increased algal blooms." Next month, Lips will claw her way up a western Panama mountain range to compare troubled frog habitats with spots where the critters are thriving. When she returns, she'll share her findings with students in her ecology, zoology and herpetology classes at SIUC. Lips, an assistant professor of zoology, joined SIUC's faculty in the fall, after teaching at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York. She holds a bachelor's in zoology from the University of South Florida (1988) and a doctorate in biology from the University of Miami (1995). A Florida native, she is the daughter of Donald Lips of Jensen Beach, Fla., and Elizabeth Adjer of Sylva, N.C.
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