So as a result, I had just become the chair of the Species Survival Commission of the World Conservation Union. So I established a special task force on the declining amphibian populations and we set out to determine what was going on around the world. And the reports kept coming in confirming the disappearance of species and diminishment of populations everywhere. And it wasn’t in terms of a specific cause in addition to habitat destruction of, especially creatures in very restricted ranges a couple of acres on the mountain side, in addition to the degradation, destruction of habitats, there was evidently some other factor, and we determined that factor to be disease in the form of an unusual fungus, a chytrid fungus. And we, with the help of the Chicago Zoological Society, which funded the staffing of this declining amphibian population task force. We met down in Urbana, University of Illinois, had people from Australia, UK, and elsewhere around a common electron microscope so they could not disagree about what was under the scope. And from that came the identification of this fungus, which was not named until two years later in the literature. But it clearly, almost overnight, can wipe out a species and certainly populations of creatures that are rare to begin with.
