Oriental fire-bellied toad from South KoreaFRANK PASMANSIn recent decades, large populations of frogs, toads, and salamanders in disparate regions of the world have been succumbing to the deadly chytridiomycosis disease caused by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. The sudden and dramatic die-offs have prompted a large-scale research effort to pinpoint the source of the deadly fungus, and now the results of that research are in.
After analyzing the genomes of hundreds of B. dendrobatidis samples collected from wild and captive amphibians in Australia, North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe, an international team of scientists reports in Science today (May 10) that the pathogen likely emerged from East Asia at the beginning of the 20th century.
“It’s the sort of study that we’ve needed for quite some time in the amphibian-chytrid world,” says ecologist Jason Rohr of the University of South Florida who was not involved with the study. “There’s been a lot of debate regarding the origins of the pathogen and a global analysis of this scope and scale was needed to resolve that.”
“They have done years of work to gather and culture chytrid [specimens] from around ...
