By IANS,
Sydney : Researchers have stumbled on a frog species not seen for the past 17 years in a remote location in far North Queensland.
Ross Alford of the James Cook University informed it was feared that the Armoured species had been lost in the devastating outbreaks of amphibian chytrid fungus that started in the Wet Tropics 20 years ago.
“But Jame Cook PhD student Robert Puschendorf working with myself and its Amphibian Disease Ecology Group has found a healthy population of the Armoured Mist Frog well outside the areas it used to inhabit,” Alford said.
“The population at a remote location on the Carbine Tableland is healthy and is coexisting with a healthy population of the Waterfall Frog, Litoria nannotis, another species that declined due to the fungus.
“All frogs of both species are in good health, although most individuals are infected with the amphibian chytrid fungus.”
Amphibian chytrid fungus is believed to have caused the extinctions of all known high elevation populations of seven frog species in the Wet Tropics between the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“Some of those species have since recolonised some sites,” Alford said, “and our team has been working to discover how they are now able to coexist with this devastating pathogen.”