No snark here. The farther I read into this story the more horrified I got. After the second graf I was hoping desperately this was somebody's lame attempt at humor, or a misplaced April Fools piece. Nope. This is terrifying. From the Chicago Tribune:

A devastating fungus is sweeping the world, wiping out entire populations of amphibians at such a rate that Brookfield Zoo biologists are helping pull together a massive "Noah's Ark" project to capture frogs, toads and salamanders and put them in safe places.

A variety of factors already have combined to cause more than 120 amphibian species to vanish since 1980, in what one biologist has called "one of the largest extinction spasms for vertebrates in history."

A third of the world's nearly 6,000 amphibian species are threatened—their populations weak and susceptible to disease.

Why is this not the lead headline in every paper, the lead story on every newscast? Why are the cabloids not even mentioning this matter, much less giving it about 1/537th the attention they do the Missing White Woman du Jour?

Don't answer that. It's apparently up to us.

It is hard to determine how many species have been affected by the fungus because they cannot be assessed fast enough, but it has factored into most of the recent extinctions and declines, said Bob Lacy, the zoo's population geneticist and chairman of the Conservation Breeding Specialist Group.

That leaves no time for anything but a triage attempt to get some of the animals out of harm's way until this "tragically unique" disease can be further studied and countered, he said.

"It is a race against time, and it's a matter of months," Lacy said.

Among zoologists, some have begun to face questions of which species should be saved and why.

"It's terrible, I've never experienced anything like this," said David Wake, a biology professor and curator of herpetology at the University of California at Berkeley, the first scientist to officially declare a pattern of global amphibian declines in 1989. "It's really an awful prospect."

When this fungal disease came along, amphibians the world over already faced significant stress from global warming, pesticides and herbicides, acid rain and habitat destruction, experts said.

Some scientists point to them as bellwether animals for the Earth's health. Their slippery, porous skin absorbs moisture around them, making them more vulnerable to environmental changes than mammals, birds and reptiles with their fur, feathers or scales.

But chytridomycosis, caused by the chytrid fungus, is adding a confounding new level of peril that is pushing many species over the brink—even in areas mostly untouched by human hands.

"This is a totally unusual conservation dilemma—species going extinct in a relatively pristine environment," said Alejandro Grajal, Brookfield Zoo's senior vice president of conservation, education and training. "Now we're basically trying to save as many as we can as we try to figure out our next step."

Chytridomycosis was first identified in 1998 and is not well understood. As it moves around the globe, it has caused massive amphibian die-offs in Australia and hit the population of boreal toads in the Rocky Mountains. In the Sierra Nevadas, California-Berkeley researcher Vance Vredenburg found "piles" of mountain yellow-legged frogs dead from the disease two years ago.

The disease is filtering down Central America—one of the most biologically diverse areas on the planet—at a rate of about 17 miles a year, faster than a frog can hop to the next pond. With support from the Houston Zoo, Mauricio Caballero is leading an effort to build a field facility in Panama to preserve species, but the fungus caught up to his El Valle region before the roof was up.

"We knew what was going to happen, and now we're seeing the frogs starting to die," he said after a meeting with other Latin American experts Monday in Brookfield. "We weren't expecting it to hit so soon. We were predicting it was going to hit in the rainy season."

Now scientists are scurrying to collect frogs and put them in temporary tanks in hotel rooms and people's houses until the building's ready, Caballero said. Plans to save 65 species have been downscaled to the dozen or so most endangered—including the beautiful, iridescent Panamanian golden frog. The species is a cultural icon for its people as the bald eagle is for Americans—it's been depicted in jewelry since pre-Columbian times and is the inspiration of local festivals.

Go, read the rest. They're going to need money and somehow I don't think the lobbyists from Monsanto are going to help push an emergency appropriation through.