Date of Publication: 07.30.15. 07.30.15

What It’s Like to Watch a Species Go Extinct

Red-bellied newt (Taricha rivularis) — Red-bellied newt (*Taricha rivularis*) Emanuele Biggi/anura.it

Karen Lips was a grad student when she came face to face with a mass extinction for the first time. It was the early 1990s, and she was doing research on frogs in the mountains of Costa Rica. At the beginning, they were everywhere. And then, poof: “I came back one year and there were no frogs,” she remembers. Puzzled, she explored other sites—and started turning up corpses. An area that had thrummed with amphibian life had morphed into a graveyard.

Over the course of the next few years, Lips and her colleagues would identify the troubling cause of death: a fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd for short, growing all over their bodies. That’s a problem because amphibians drink and even breathe by absorbing water and oxygen directly through their skin. Bd, which belongs to a phylum of fungi called chytrids, interferes with that, messing with blood chemistry and leading to organ failure. Since Lips helped discover it, Bd has caused the collapse or extinction of over 200 amphibian species around the world—the most devastating wildlife disease ever recorded. Read more.

Conservation

The sixth extinction. It came for the frogs.

What It’s Like to Watch a Species Go Extinct

Venomous Frogs Use Heads as Weapons

Aechmea pineliana

Conservation

What It’s Like to Watch a Species Go Extinct

Venomous Frogs Use Heads as Weapons﻿

Aechmea pineliana

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