““At the time, BD was creeping fast across the Sierra Nevada, covering around 700 metres a year. By charting its advances, Vredenburg predicted that it would next hit Dusy Basin, a site some 11,000 feet above sea level, where thousands of yellow-legged frogs remained oblivious to the encroaching doom. It was the perfect place to put J-liv's powers to the test. In 2010, Vredenburg and his team hiked to Dusy Basin and grabbed every frog they could find. They found J-liv on the skin of one individual, and grew it into rich, thriving cultures. They then baptised some of the other captured individuals in this bacterial broth. The rest, they left in containers that just had pond water. After a few hours, they released all the frogs to fate and fungus. "The results were phenomenal," says Vredenburg. As predicted, Bd arrived that summer. The fungus took its usual toll on the frogs that had just been soaked in pond water-dozens of spores became thousands of spores, and each frog became an ex-frog. But in the animals that were dunked in J-liv, the fatal accumulation of spores not only plateaued early, it often reversed. A year later, around 39 percent of them were still alive, while their peers were all dead. The trial had worked. The team had successfully protected a wild population of vulnerable frogs with a microbe. And they had established J-liv as a probiotic: a term that is most commonly linked to yoghurts and supplements, but really applies to any microbe that can be applied to a host to improve its health.””
