OUR WORK
Australia is a world leader in species extinction and declines, largely due to invasive species.
Our Work | Ending extinction | Photo by Lindy Lumsden
Extinct: Northern gastric brooding frog
- Common name: Northern gastric brooding frog
- Scientific name: Rheobatrachus vitellinus
- Formal national status: Extinct
- Decade of extinction: 1980s
- Expert assessment of extinction causes: Invasive species Chytrid fungus 99%
The northern gastric brooding frog was found and lost in a little over a year. It was discovered in January 1984, and by June the following year it had vanished, never to be seen again.
Its demise was well documented because the Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service began a monitoring program in the very month of its discovery. For 2–5 days every month, biologist Keith McDonald visited Eungella National Park, where it lived along rainforest streams. He searched small streams at night with a headlamp, and looked by day under fringing vegetation and rocks, finding ‘abundant’ frogs at each site, sometimes as many as 6 along a 5-metre stretch of creek.
Signs of decline came in January 1985, although the frogs remained plentiful at higher altitudes until March. Then for 2 months McDonald did not visit, and when he returned in June he could not find a single northern gastric brooding frog. Many subsequent searches also failed.
Populations of another frog in the same streams, the Eungella torrent frog (Taudactylus eungellensis), also crashed at the same time, but this frog did not go extinct.
When the northern gastric brooding frog went extinct the world ceased to have any animals that rear young in their stomachs. Photo: © Dr Hal Cogger
A serious last-ditch search for the northern gastric brooding frog came in 2021, when scientists were dropped by helicopter into the remote western side of the Eungella Range, to camp for 3 nights and search creeks that had not been visited before. They found ideal habitat but no gastric brooding frogs. Water samples tested for residual DNA from frogs living upstream did not yield any positives.
McDonald was mystified at the time by the disappearances. These rainforests had not been disturbed by logging, clearing or mining. The weather had not been unusual.
In 1996 he became one of 3 biologists to publish a controversial paper proposing that a mystery epidemic had caused this and other frog disappearances and declines. Two years later a paper announced the discovery of amphibian chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis), detected in large numbers on dead and dying frogs in north Queensland rainforests and also in Panama. The consensus today is that the northern gastric brooding frog, along with the southern gastric brooding frog and the more fortunate Eungella torrent frog, were victims of this fungus, which originated in East Asia.
Extinct
Australia has lost about 100 native plants and animals to extinction since colonisation, most of which were mainly due to invasive species. An estimated 27 of those extinctions occurred since the 1960s.
Learn more about some of Australia’s lost animals: