Madagascar best for chytrid fungus studies

TURIN, Italy, May 6 (UPI) -- An Italian-led team of scientists says Madagascar is one of the best places to study the plight of Earth's amphibian species faced with extinction.

Nearly one-third of all amphibian species are threatened by the widespread emergence of the deadly chytrid fungus. Now Franco Andreone, curator of zoology at the Regional Museum of Natural Sciences in Turin, Italy, and colleagues argue the effort to save the amphibians should be focused in Madagascar, "a global hotspot of amphibian diversity that shows no signs of amphibian declines or traces of the chytrid fungus."

"In Madagascar," the authors argue, "amphibian conservation efforts have the possibility of being proactive, rather than reactive, or simply postmortem."

While 90 percent of the island's original vegetation has been destroyed by human activity, no Malagasy amphibian species have been reported as extinct, although a quarter of the 220 species evaluated by the World Conservation Union are listed as threatened.

The conspicuous absence of the chytrid fungus only serves to underscore the precariousness of the situation, the scientists said. Intensive conservation efforts in Madagascar, the authors argue, could "avert an otherwise predictable catastrophic loss of biodiversity."

Their study appears in the journal PLoS Biology.