'Extinct' frog triumphs over fungus

SYDNEY, Australia - A tiny frog species thought by many experts to be extinct has been rediscovered alive and well in a remote area of Australia's tropical north, researchers said last week.

The 1.5-inch-long armoured mist frog had not been seen since 1991, and many experts assumed it had been wiped out by a devastating fungus that struck northern Queensland state.

But two months ago, a doctoral student at James Cook University in Townsville was conducting research on another frog species in Queensland and stumbled across what appeared to be several armoured mist frogs in a creek, said professor Ross Alford, head of a research team on threatened frogs at the university.

Conrad Hoskin, a researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra who has been studying the evolutionary biology of north Queensland frogs for the last 10 years, conducted DNA tests on tissue samples from the frogs and determined they were the elusive armoured mist frog.

"A lot of us were starting to believe it had gone extinct, so to discover it now is amazing," Hoskin said. "It means some of the other species that are missing could potentially just be hidden away along some of the streams up there."

The light brown frogs with dark brown spots congregate in areas with fast-flowing water. So far, 30 to 40 have been found.

The chytrid fungus was blamed for decimating frog populations worldwide, including seven species in Queensland's tropics between the late 1980s and early 1990s. Armoured mist frogs had been classified as critically endangered rather than extinct, but most researchers believed they had died out from the disease, Alford said.

Most of the armoured mist frogs that Alford's group has found are infected with the fungus, but the disease does not appear to be making them sick, he said.