What It’s Like to Watch a Species Go Extinct - or why we study Bd

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.

Read more here:
http://www.wired.com/2015/07/watching-species-go-extinct-frogs-bd-salamanders-bsal/

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