The golden toad was the first species where climate change has been identified as a key driver of extinction.
For just a few days every year, the elfin cloud forest of Costa Rica came alive with crowds of golden toads the length of a child's thumb, emerging from the undergrowth to mate at rain-swelled pools. In this mysterious woodland the cloud drapes over mountain ridges and"the trees are dwarfed and wind-sculpted, gnarled and heavily laden with mosses," said J Alan Pounds, an ecologist at the"The soils are very dark and so golden toads would stand out like animal figurines.
They found not only the signature of the periodic El Nino weather phenomenon, but also trends linked to changes in climate. Pounds and his colleagues linked the declines to chytridiomycosis infection, but concluded that disease was only the"bullet -- climate change was pulling the trigger. Vegetation that provided its food plummeted from 11 plant species in 1998 to just two in 2014. It was recently declared extinct.
But Foden said the threat of climate change means that the response will have to go beyond traditional conservation.
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