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Bad news re: Bsal

Posted: April 20th, 2017, 12:38 pm
by Jimi
Europe's largest and best known salamander species, the fire salamander, is falling victim to a deadly fungus, and new research is making scientists more pessimistic about its future. A 2-year study of a population in Belgium, now entirely wiped out, has revealed that these amphibians can't develop immunity to the fungus, as was hoped. To make matters worse, it turns out the fungus creates a hardy spore that can survive in water for months and also stick to birds' feet, offering a way for it to spread rapidly across the continent. Two other kinds of amphibians, both resistant to the disease, also act as carriers for the highly infectious spores.

"This is terrible news," says geneticist Matthew Fisher of Imperial College London, who studies the fungus but was not involved in the new research. "This isn't a problem that's going to go away. It's a problem that's going to get worse."
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/ ... ot-scarier