A fungus that causes heart failure in amphibians has previously been blamed for dramatic population collapses in the Americas and Australia – and now it’s spreading in Africa
, reaching every continent except Antarctica by the late 1900s. Yet its impact in Africa has remained relatively unexplored. Previous research suggests it has been on the continent since the 1930s, albeit at low levels.
To learn more, Vredenburg and colleagues turned to museum collections of amphibians. Fungi and other parasites often get preserved along with the animals they inhabit, which allows researchers to use museum specimens for studying the history of infectious diseases. The team took skin swabs from nearly 3000 specimens collected in Africa over the past century. They also tested the skin of 1651 live amphibians found in the wild, and gathered thousands of additional records from other studies of specimens collected between 1852 and 2017.A monthly celebration of the biodiversity of our planet’s animals, plants and other organisms.kept a low profile in Africa during the 1900s, consistently appearing in less than 5 per cent of animals tested.
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