European Action Plan for Alytes obstetricans and chytridiomycosis

The European Union published an Action Plan for the conservation of the Midwife toad Alytes obstetricans (the pdf [1 MB] can be found here). The members of the RACE team, Jaime Bosch and Benedikt Schmidt, contributed to the Action Plan which includes a section on chytridiomycosis.

No Bd in Hydromantes

A new paper by Ylenia Chiari et al. which was published in Amphibia-Reptilia shows that there is no Bd in Hydromantes salamanders. This is good news since RACE team members have shown that other species on Sardinia suffer from lethal chytridiomycosis. Link to the paper here.

No Bd in West Africa

A new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE suggests that there is no Bd in West Africa, even in a species that if often found in the trade. The paper (open access) can be found here (link).

New Bd distribution data on maps

New data from a study on Bd in Germany which was published in the journal Salamandra were added to the maps. This is an important addition because it's data from Bd-positive and Bd-negative sites from a country were there is not much data yet.

Are crayfish to blame?

Bd: Is there a role for crayfish? There's an interesting news story in National Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/121217-chytrid-fungus-amphibian-frog-crayfish-science/

New European report on invasive alien species includes Bd

The European Environment Agency just published a report on invasive alien species in Europe. There is also a chapter on Bd.

The almost complete story of RACE and Bd in Europe

The freelance journalist Katharine Sanderson has written about the RACE project, its origins and Bd research in an in-depth story at BBC. It summarizes well the research of RACE and the roles of some of the researchers involved. I particularly liked the sentence "..there are more fundamental problems to deal with – like how to get a stubborn ass to shift." That's true, not only for donkeys. Read the story here
and for those in the UK it is here