Monteverde amphibian decline and the extinction of the golden toad
Declive de anfibios de Monteverde y extinción del sapo dorado
- Date
- 1989-1999 · confidence medium
- Place
- Monteverde, Puntarenas, Costa Rica
- Credited to
- J. Alan Pounds, Michael Fogden and John Campbell
- Field
- Life & health
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
The golden toad (Incilius periglenes), described in 1966, disappeared in 1989 from the cloud forest of Monteverde along with other species, and Pounds and colleagues linked those disappearances to climate change in 1999. It was one of the first signs of vertebrate extinctions tied to warming.
The cause is debated: climate change (Pounds's hypothesis), the chytrid fungus or an interaction of both; the purely climatic hypothesis has been questioned. 1999 is assigned for the Nature publication, with the decline observed in 1987-1989.
What it led to
- studies of global amphibian decline due to chytridiomycosis and climate
- climate-change indicators in cloud forests
- a symbol of the biodiversity crisis