 We work on a disease, it's a fungus that affects frogs and this disease has been found out to be a major contributor to the global declines and amphibians that we're unfortunately currently seeing. This fungus, I'm going to say the name, it's called betrachocytrium dendrobatidis but for obvious reasons we call it BD, it's a bit of a mouthful, has been spreading around the world and these frogs that you see around you are affected by this fungus. The frogs we use here are, they're called midwife toads and this species is found widely across Europe. The zoospores that are produced by BD swim through the water and when they strike the amphibian skin they deploy some very potent enzymes called proteases. These zoospores literally burn their way into the amphibian skin and they then become intracellular and go through subsequent reproductive cycles to colonize the skin of the amphibian and it's that point that skin function is disrupted and that the animal will fall sick. These midwife toads are the most susceptible species to the fungus so we work in the high Pyrenees above 2,000 meters we see very aggressive die-offs of these elities in a number of populations and in the number of populations they now no longer exist because the fungus has killed them all. So until 2014 we thought this was a single disease, BD. In fact we thought it was a single lineage of the single disease which we call BD GPL which is the global panzerotic lineage. This is the bad guy which has been extirpating amphibians around the world but then scientists working in the Netherlands discovered that the fire salamanders there were going extinct and that they discovered that there was another chytrid which has subsequently been called Batrachokytrium salamandravorans, the salamander killer. There's now at least two chytrids which kill amphibian species. What we're finding that in these amphibians which are taken out of tropical rainforests and traded around the world quite a high proportion of these are infected with BD and we've actually shown that some of these infected trade animals when released into the environment have spread their infection to the environment so we believe that the amphibian trade is a very important vector of this infection around the world. What the United States has done is they've thrown up a trade barrier to all to 201 species of salamander from southeast Asia and from Europe in an effort to prevent that infection coming in on traded animals. It's perfectly possible to breed amphibians in facilities like this and to have them certified as pathogen free and then to be bought as pets. The treatment that we have developed here in these laboratories is an antifungal drug called archiconazole. This is commonly used in humans and in pets but we've found that if we use very dilute concentrations of this antifungal with tadpoles all these metamorphs then they will clear infection. The chytrid is thankfully very very susceptible to archiconazole. So by finding the exact dose that we can use on an animal without harming it we can then go into natural environments and try those doses on infected animals and then to clear them. So I have a fantastic collaborator in Spain called Jaime Bosch and he works on the island of Mallorca. Jaime Bosch went there year after year. Sometimes he had helicopters to lift these tadpoles out. Sometimes it was just backpacks with water bottles with tadpoles in and air bubbles. Once these tadpoles were in a captive environment they then got the archiconazole treatment. They were kept until we were sure that they were clear of infection and then were reintroduced back into the environment. In association with this we also use some chemical disinfection in the environment where we wash rocks with this compound called vercon which cleared any residual stages that was of the fungus that were clinging to the rocks and by doing this we eventually cleared the infection from the island of Mallorca. So this is a massive coup because this is the first time that a wildlife disease has actually been combated and eradicated in nature. We're now moving to mainland Spain where there are larger populations and they're more connected than this isolated island community and we're going to now try this treatment on a much wider set of population to see if it has any utility in a more real world context. So already scientists are using our iticonazole treatment protocol in other species in Panama, in Costa Rica, in South Africa. They're having some success in at least being able to create captive amphibian arks where they have clean animals without the fungal infection that are breeding so that when we do come up with a mitigation approach that we can use in the environment then we actually have these captive species that you can then reintroduce to the wild.