🐸 This frog is leapfrogging back

Harlequin frogs are a type of frog that comes in many bright colors. Unfortunately, they were hit really hard by a skin-eating fungus that spread around the world quickly in the 1980s.

Between 1988 and 1989, the Jambato harlequin frog disappeared completely. People searched for them for years.

Then in 2016, a boy found a small group of Jambato frogs in a mountain valley in Ecuador. This was a miracle for a species that had been missing for decades.

Now researchers have reported that they have found around one-third of the harlequin frogs that were previously thought to have gone extinct.

“We’ve got a second chance here,” says Kyle Jaynes, a conservation biologist at Michigan State University. “There is still a lot we have to do to conserve these species.”

The fact that people are starting to notice the reemergence of species that were once thought to be gone forever “gives me a lot of hope that other species that are harder to observe  are also recovering. It motivates me to think we should go look for them," says Valerie McKenzie, a disease ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder to Science News.

All over the world we see species making a comeback:

💡 The return of the wild animals

It is easy to imagine that wildlife is in decline in Europe. But that picture does not match up to reality. On the contrary, many species are making a comeback. In several ways, this is good news. Maria Eriksson explains why.

Warp NewsMaria Eriksson