Whoopsy. An effort to bring endangered Mallorcan toads back from the brink of extinction has blighted them with an infectious fungus that is wiping them out.

A recent paper in Current Biology details how the captive breeding and subsequent reintroduction of the Mallorcan Midwife Toad – on the red-list of endangered species – has infected populations in the wild with Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a fungus that has been threatening amphibians worldwide for the past ten years.

The Digital Journal closes its piece on the subject by saying that the fungus hasn’t been as devastating to the midwife toad as to other amphibian species. But whether this is good fortune, or merely a time lag, isn’t clear.

Science gives a nice potted history of this particular hoppy critter, its discovery, and the initial success of the captive breeding programme which has gone so wrong.

The authors, led by Susan Walker from Imperial College London, use the paper to highlight the valuable lesson that breeding programmes must be monitored to make sure they don’t become hot beds of infections for the very species they are intended to save. Breeding oodles of endangered toads is great, they say, but please please please make sure they’re free from infection before sending them back to their native environment.

Image: Mallorcan midwife toad by ‘tuurio and wallie’ via Wikimedia