Conservation news out of the Wet Tropics is usually a list of things getting worse, so this one is worth marking.
Researchers from James Cook University have found that two frog species badly hit by the chytrid fungus outbreaks of the 1980s and 90s have not only survived but expanded into new territory.
What they did
The team collected water samples from 11 sites through the World Heritage Daintree Rainforest and tested them for environmental DNA, or eDNA. Rather than trying to find and count small, well-camouflaged, mostly nocturnal frogs, you sample the water they live in and look for traces of them.
Dr Cecilia Villacorta-Rath, senior research officer with TropWATER at JCU, told ABC Far North that these frogs were ideal for the method because they spend almost their entire lives in water, which makes their DNA easy to detect downstream.
What they found
The endangered waterfall frog and the endangered Australian lace-lid frog were both detected in places they had not previously been recorded.
“That was a nice surprise, because they have recovered better than we, or the scientists, originally thought they had recovered,” Dr Villacorta-Rath said.
The third species, the critically endangered armoured mistfrog, is a different story. It turned up at only one of the 11 sites. That frog was believed extinct for years before being rediscovered, and it remains restricted to a single known population.
All three species are found only in the Wet Tropics of north-east Queensland, which is to say they exist here and nowhere else on Earth. The findings were published in the July issue of Conservation Science and Practice, from sampling done between October 2019 and January 2020.
The caveat, because there is always one
Dr Laura Grogan of the University of Queensland, who was not involved in the research, made the point that a population can look healthy and still be fragile. Mass deaths create a genetic bottleneck, so “even if they look as though they are abundant, they are still genetically not as robust as they were originally”. That leaves them exposed to the next shock, whether that is drought, a weather event or the fungus itself, which she says “is still very highly virulent in the field”.
The next stage of the research is to look at genetic diversity within these populations, again using eDNA.
Will you see one?
Honestly, probably not, and you should not go looking for them. These are stream-dwelling rainforest frogs in specific habitats, and chytrid fungus spreads on wet gear, so tramping between waterways in the same boots is exactly how you move it around.
What you can do is enjoy the fact that the rainforest you are walking through is quietly recovering something. If you want frogs, the accessible version is a guided night walk with a licensed operator in the Daintree or at Cape Tribulation, where the guides know what is where and how to look without wrecking the place.
And if you are walking anywhere near rainforest streams, clean and dry your footwear between catchments. It is a small thing that genuinely matters here.
Research findings and quotes from ABC Far North, 26 August 2026, reporting work published in Conservation Science and Practice.
