Apollo, a 1-year-old boxer, loves to swim in warm water.
"He’s a fish," said Kathy Silva, a UF chemical engineering senior and Apollo’s owner. "He wants to be in water forever."
But as summer temperatures rise, north-central Florida lakes are susceptible to a rare pathogen, said Erica Goss, a UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences researcher.
The UF plant pathology assistant professor said the pathogen, called Pythium insidiosum, is a microscopic, fungus-like organism that swims in search of hosts such as dogs and horses.
It then infects its host with pythiosis, a disease that can cause intestinal swelling if swallowed and a skin infection if the animal swims in an infected lake without being bathed afterward, Goss said.
"We heard cases of people’s dogs getting it in the Gainesville area, so we thought, ‘Well, it’s probably out there, but no one’s ever looked,’" she said.
"We started sampling on campus and found it right away."
Last summer, Goss’s research assistant and master’s student Jackson Presser sampled a broader area of North Florida, discovering the organism in all 25 lakes he tested.
Goss said that as it has gotten hotter, lakes have become more susceptible to the pathogen.
"The pathogen is active when it’s hot," Goss said. "It likes the swampy, warm, stagnant water."
Silva said she plans on ordering a pythiosis vaccine for Apollo and bathing him after he swims, but she will not ban him from going in lakes.
"I don’t want to limit how excited and happy he gets," the 23-year-old said.
Riley, a 6-year-old Irish Setter and German Shepherd mix, retrieves a tennis ball in a man-made pond at Dogwood park on Aug. 26, 2015. The 15-acre off-leash dog park offers two swimming ponds that are both treated and maintained on a regular basis.
