"His attention was entirely absorbed by the attempt to net tadpoles swimming in a reservoir in the vast Mojave desert. It was one of the perfect moments in my childhood, he says. Tadpoles: so cool. I wanted to get as many in my net as I could, and just look at them and admire them and understand, he says, recalling the moment."
"Waddle has been through a metamorphosis of his own. He has gone from being a child obsessively clutching a binder full of animal trivia in a Las Vegas neighbourhood, his parents barely scraping by, he says, to becoming the first person in his family to get a PhD, which he received from the University of Melbourne in 2022. Today, the 35-year-old is working in Australia to help save the species that fascinated him as a boy."
Anthony Waddle discovered a lifelong fascination with tadpoles and metamorphosis as a child netting tadpoles in the Mojave desert. He overcame financial hardship to earn a PhD from the University of Melbourne and became a conservation biologist. Waddle focuses on saving frogs from the chytrid fungus, which has wiped out at least 90 species and threatens hundreds more. Frogs provide ecosystem services by consuming disease-carrying insects and offer potential biomedical benefits through skin compounds. To slow the disease, Waddle and a colleague experimented with frog-sized masonry bricks to create heated refuges — described as frog saunas — to reduce fungal infection risk.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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