'Extinct' frog comes back to life (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Richard Black
Environment Correspondent, BBC News website

Scientists have sighted a spectacular South American frog which had been feared extinct for a decade.



The painted frog is found only in a small remote region of Colombia, and the last sighting dates back to 1995.

Conservationists believed it had gone extinct, principally due to a fungal disease, chytridiomycosis, which has caused enormous harm to many species.

The team behind the rediscovery say it gives hope that other amphibians may be able to survive fungal attack.

Chytridiomycosis is the main reason behind the worldwide decline in amphibians, which sees about one third of all species threatened with extinction.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4998074.stm

[Vinnie From Indy]

1. The first thing it said was "I dreamed GW Bush was President and

the earth was hurtling toward environmental catastrophe".

[Sequoia]

2. Hoffa may not be extinct after all either.

[NNadir]

3. That's a beautiful animal and a wonderful piece of news.

Thanks.

[eppur_se_muova]

4. Yeah, he struck me as a handsome devil, so I posted the larger jpeg. nt

[soothsayer]

5. So they captured it and killed it....

[Dogmudgeon]

6. That's one hell of a frog!

I'm glad it's back.

I like frogs. But I've heard they're going extinct en masse. I hope I'm wrong about that.

--p!

[Dead_Parrot]

8. Sadly, I think your right

Frogs (and other amphibians) tend to absorb toxins at an inordinately high rate, because their skins aren't quite watertight. Given that they are also very complex forms of life with a lot of biochemistry to go wrong, they're stuck with being our environmental "canaries".

And they're dying.

There's a message there, I think.

[depakid]

7. I guess there's reason

That they've survived this long....

Thanks so much for another positive thing.

Doubled our quota....;)