Hang on, it's just finished. It was called Saving Species, according to the presenter, who I would assume has no reason to lie about these things.
As it turns out the killer frog fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis if you are being polite, "Bd" to its friends) is quite a serious issue. According to the half an hour or so of Google-based research I've just done, anyway. The numbers vary wildly across the different articles I have looked at, but it seems that around about a third of all amphibian species are currently under threat of extinction. There are various theories about the reasons for this, but chytridiomycosis, the disease caused by Bd, is one of the major players.
It's highly infectious and has a 80% mortality rate. No one quite knows where it came from, or why it's suddenly become so prevalent, or how to stop it, but a lot of scientists are working on answers to these questions. One of them is Professor Poulter, who is worried about the declining population of corroboree frogs in Australia:
I would really feel quite satisfied if we could say, 10 years from now, that you have to be careful walking around [Australia's] Kosiuszko National Park or you might tread on a corroboree frog because they're all over the place," said Professor Poulter. "I would take real satisfaction from that".
The earliest reported case of Bd was in 1938, in some clawed frogs in South Africa. I learnt this from an article in Science Daily, but this is the part of the story which completely blew my mind (which was already reeling from the discovery that some frogs have claws):
Around this time there was a huge trade in clawed frogs when they were used in one of the earliest human pregnancy tests. The global exportation of the clawed frog is likely to have spread Bd around the world.Frog based pregnancy testing. Who knew? Certainly not me.
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