Ever wonder why frog’s skin bacteria repel the deadly fungus, chytridiomycosis!? Me neither. But JMU Bio Professor Reid Harris did and his curiosity landed him an appearance on Animal Planet!

I’ve in fact been on Animal Planet before (I was picked out of the audience about a decade ago when I visited Universal Studios and watched a taping of one of their shows). But back to Professor Harris.

His three-minute video filmed in Burruss Hall at JMU can be seen if you fast forward to about 48:00 minutes in the Vanishing Frog episode with Jeff Corwin who, by the way, seems like he has no idea or interest in what he’s talking about.

I personally couldn’t care less about the immunity that frog’s bacteria have to fungi, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. I’ve never been into science because no matter how many times you explain it to me, simple concepts like the telephone still make no sense to me (they can hear me speaking 3,000 miles away at the same time, HOW!?). It’s all over my head, but if it saves a few frogs—SUPER!

Harris has also been featured in National Geographic, Nature.com, MicrobeWorld, and New Scientist. For this particular study, he took in undergrad and grad students.

Colleges are home to some of the best research in the country and it certainly seems JMU is harboring some of it.