Museum specimens reveal how fungal epidemic spread

摘要

For the last 3 decades, potential explanations for the mass extinction of neotropical amphibians have included habitat destruction, the pet trade, pollution, and climate change. Tina Cheng et al. (pp. 9502-9507) investigated the link between amphibian declines and the rise and spread of the infectious fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium den-drobatidis (Bd), which has caused amphibian declines in Australia, Panama, California, and Peru. The authors used PCR and other molecular techniques to test museum samples of amphibians gathered before, during, and after the current amphibian die-offs to investigate the role of the fungus in two perplexing amphibian extinctions: the disappearance of the golden toad and harlequin frog from Costa Rica's Mon-teverde Reserve in the late 1980s, and the loss of salamanders from the mountains of southern Mexico and western Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s.