Pregnancy test may lie behind deadly frog fungus

As you may know, frogs are dying all over the earth, and the cause — or at least one cause — seems to be a fungus.

Where did this fungus come from? I couldn't make this up — Pregnancy test may lie behind deadly frog fungus:

"We think we have traced the origin of the spread of the amphibian chytrid fungus to the 'frog' pregnancy test for women, which was widely used from the 1930s to the 1960s," said Che Weldon, a zoologist at North-West University who has been researching the phenomenon.

That test involved taking the urine of a woman and injecting it into an African clawed frog. If the woman was pregnant the hormones in her urine would stimulate ovulation in the frog and it would spawn within a matter of hours.

The species was exported to labs around the world in huge quantities from South Africa from the 1930s -- the decade in which Weldon has traced the first recorded case of the fungus by examining preserved frogs in museum collections.

Some of the exported frogs were released or escaped into the wild where it is believed they spread the fungus, which can move quickly through a water system and can jump from one frog species to another.

The first case of the fungus recorded outside South Africa was in 1961 in Quebec, Canada.

Adding weight to the case for an African origin is the fact that the fungus is widespread in southern Africa but frogs in the region appear to have developed a resistance to it.