Biologists urge FWS to ban importation of Asian salamanders

Salamanders are immensely popular pets, the University of California Berkeley notes. They say the disease mainly spreads through the pet trade, thus the importation of the amphibian must be immediately stopped.

The tricky fungus was first found back in 2013, when it started killing off hundreds upon hundreds of fire salamanders in the Netherlands. Specifically, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and Japan are a few of the countries implicated in this.

As mentioned by biologist Vance Vredenburg of San Francisco State University, “This is the hot bed in the world for diversity of amphibians, and if that fungus gets here, it’s going to be devastating”. “We actually have a decent chance of preventing a major catastrophe”. If something isn’t done, the fungus could decimate salamander populations, and restricting salamander trade is the only way to effectively do this. It’s an imminent threat that could prove viciously harmful if allowed to pass from Asia, where it first originated, to North America. The salamander fungus has already spread across parts of Europe, where it has resulted in a 96 percent fatality rate among the European salamander species that it infected.

The rough-skinned newt (Taricha granulosa) is very susceptible to the deadly fungus. It’s an acute infection that horribly deems the salamanders into nothing but little masses of slime within three or four days. Koo is also an associate director at AmphibiaWeb. This trade could be very problematic to North America according to the report was published in Science. It could hurt populations within the United States and in North America, which accounts for the world’s 48 per cent of the 676 salamander species. By studying habitats on the continent along with salamander

He and his colleagues discovered that humans initially carried the initial virus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis and they have spread it across the world, infecting many extinct species. Los Angeles was found to be the largest port of entry, with 419,890 over this period, and of that number, 418,692 were considered Bsal threats. “They’re frequently the top predator and can make up the majority of the animal biomass of a forest”. There is a ray of hope, he added.