From rays to deep-sea snails, primates to rosewood trees, the latest IUCN Red List update paints a gloomy picture for our world’s species. The update, which includes assessments of 105,732 animal and plant species to date, lists more than 28,000 species as threatened with extinction, attributing much of the declines to human overexploitation. The red-capped […]
Tag: chytridiomycosis
Deadly Fungus Has Decimated More Than 500 Amphibian Species
One of the most threatening invasive species on earth is so small it can’t be seen with the human eye, but it’s ravaging amphibians around the world and has become one of the deadliest diseases known to science. Chytridiomycosis is caused by the chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd as it’s become known, which kills […]
‘Death by a thousand holes’: Scientists race to avert a salamander crisis
Any day now. That’s when Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal), the “salamander-eating” fungus, is expected to arrive in the United States, home to more than a third of the world’s species of these slippery amphibians.It all began in 2008, when Bsal traveledsome through the pet trade from Asia to northern Europe. There, it escaped into the wild […]
New skeleton frog from Madagascar is already critically endangered
Sometimes all it takes is fewer clicks. Scientists have discovered a new species of frog from Madagascar that stuck out in part because it “clicked” less during calls than similar species. Unfortunately the scientists believe the new species—dubbed the Ankarafa skeleton frog (Boophis ankarafensis)—is regulated to a single patch of forest, which, despite protected status, […]
Amazonian students help monitor threatened frog populations
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, amphibians are the most threatened group of animals on Earth: currently around 30 percent of the world’s amphibians are listed as threatened with extinction. However this percentage doesn’t include those species about which too little is known to evaluate (26 percent). Amphibians face many threats but […]