Karen has never been quiet. She was finishing her PhD in tropical biology in the early 1990s when she came back to a research site high up in the mountains. The air was filled with the sounds of the frog species she was studying. Almost all the animals were gone.
She moved her research sites further south in Central America, into the mountains of Panama, and as far south as the border with Columbia. They found a wave of death preceding them wherever they went. She remembers that it was already too late to get there.
When she was a graduate student at the University of Maryland College Park, she saw the arrival in the Americas of a fungus epidemic that had been sweeping the globe. The Bd pathogen originated in Asia and probably spread for decades before it was noticed. Scientists estimate that since then, 90 amphibian species have been made extinct by the fungus, and more than 400 were severely harmed by it, losing up to 90 percent of their populations. More than 6 percent of the world's amphibian species were destroyed or decimated in a single year.
Over the years, Lips and other scientists were able to document the decline in populations of insects and snakes in the wake of the extinction of the frog and other amphibians. What looked to ecologists like profound environmental disruption was invisible to most of society because it happened far away from human habitation.
There is evidence that the damage done by Bd has trickled down to the humans.
According to a report in the journal Environmental Research Letters, a surge in human malaria cases was caused by the destruction of frog species in Costa Rica and Panama. The first published evidence shows that the worldwide amphibian die-off has consequences for people.
A professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan said that the paper was a wake-up call. The point is that the problem is not just that we're losing biodiversity. The loss of biodiversity has consequences for human welfare and human health.
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