Animal Death-Watch: Frog disappearance now disputed

I can barely believe I’m reading this. If the NYT is slowly turning on global warming theory, what next? Here we see that these poor, helpless frogs that we were killing off due to our evil human transgressions are actually not biting it thanks to our love of capitalism. Yes, a fungus is responsible. Not human-induced climate change as originally claimed with glee.

Link to Global Warming in Frogs’ Disappearance Is Challenged - New York Times:

In the scientific equivalent of the board game Clue, teams of biologists have been sifting spotty evidence and pointing to various culprits in the widespread vanishing of harlequin frogs.

The amphibians, of the genus Atelopus — actually toads despite their common name — once hopped in great numbers along stream banks on misty slopes from the Andes to Costa Rica. After 20 years of die-offs, they are listed as critically endangered by conservation groups and are mainly seen in zoos.

It looked as if one research team was a winner in 2006 when global warming was identified as the “trigger” in the extinctions by the authors of a much-cited paper in Nature. The researchers said they had found a clear link between unusually warm years and the vanishing of mountainside frog populations.