In the heat of an early evening hour, as I sat motionless, letting as much humidity as possible pass by me in its search of things to adhere to, grandson Toby arrived with his report of the day. Leer más.
Frogs place in culture ranges from the wise, to the prince in disguise. But it’s the idea that a frog can produce life-saving medicine that’s currently the subject of an international research project involving Professor Chris Shaw and colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast, in Northern Ireland. Leer más.
Imagine if your job was to locate extinct species. In 2010, biologists with The Search for Lost Frogs set out on a tropical mission hoping to confirm the existence of frog species not seen in decades. The team recovered proof of four out of a hundred missing species, including a toad among the expedition’s Top Ten Amphibians list. Leer más.
A team of 33 researchers from 26 North American, European, Australian and Asian institutions has completed the first major survey in Asia of a deadly fungus which threatens large proportions of the worlds amphibians and has already wiped out more than 200 species. From 2001 to 2009, the team surveyed more than 3,000 amphibians — mostly frogs — from 15 Asian countries, searching for any trace of the disease infecting the skin of the amphibians. The survey could help scientists to answer the question why the Chytrid fungus has been unusually devastating in many parts of the globe — and why rapid population declines and extinctions are apparently absent in Asian amphibians. The globally emerging disease chytridiomycosis, caused by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis or Bd, is next to habitat destruction one of the major driving forces in amphibian extinctions in Central, South and North America, Australia and Europe. The new Asian survey of the fungus, which was published Aug. 16 in the journal PLoS One by Andrea Swei, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, NY, USA, and colleagues, shows that Bd is prevalent at very low levels in the region. Leer más.
