BBC: “In the 1980s, people just didn’t think frogs were disappearing. Scientists said ‘don’t panic, we need the stats to prove it, all populations have natural fluctuations over time,’ and so on,” says Dr Lee Berger of James Cook University in Australia.
“By the time of the World Congress of Herpetology [the study of reptiles and amphibians] in 1990, researchers had to admit that the frogs had disappeared, they couldn’t find them and they didn’t understand why they had vanished or what to do.”
The crisis had started as early as the 1970s, when frogs began to quietly vanish from the rivers, marshes and forests of the world, taken down by a new and insidious menace: Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a pathogenic fungus that is lethal to frogs. Also known as “chytrid”, the fugus slowly suffocates the frog as it impairs the normal functioning of its skin. Animals can die within a week of infection. Entire populations seem to vanish overnight.“It was shocking to watch the spread of the disease happen in real time 15 years ago,” says Jamie Voyles, assistant professor at the University of Nevada. “In Panama, spots in the rainforest were deafeningly loud with amphibian calls. Their abundance was incredible; you couldn’t even walk through the forest without worrying about stepping on them. The next summer they were just gone.”
Just as the disappearance of birdsong alerted scientists to the devastating impacts of pesticides on eggshells, the eerie quiet of the rainforest told biologists something was wrong.