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Chytrid fungus also lurks in the Pacific Northwest. Little is known, however, about the prevalence of the disease in this region, according to Michael Adams, an ecologist at the USGS Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center in Corvallis. His team is surveying sites for chytrid in California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska as part of the program called the Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative.

Andrew Blaustein, a professor of zoology at Oregon State University, and an expert in amphibian disease also studies chytrid disease in the Northwest. His team is testing whether environmental changes such as increased exposure to UV-B radiation, a bi-product of the earth's thinning ozone layer, affects amphibian susceptibility to the disease. Blaustein also suggests that introduced species such as the bullfrog may play a key role in how the disease interacts with native populations of the Northwest. "In Oregon, every single bullfrog we examined carries the chytrid fungus on it, but they don't seem to die. They're a carrier,” says Blaustein.

Preliminary information on the disease's Northwest occurrence should be available in 2007, according to Adams.