I bet a good percentage of the people reading this comment would agree that school PE was the last thing that taught us exercise was fun. You are among friends - as you know, people who read slashdot, we were usually the last people picked for the kickball team. And even when I wasn't - I still hated PE.

According to background, we should be getting mass extinctions every several million years. We are now WAY ahead of schedule for the mass extinction we are currently in (and this applies to all creatures, not just frogs). What's happening with frogs at the moment is particularly scary though because we are losing them not just in Panama (if it were only in Panama, that would be one thing) but globally. In 2006 there was a global assessment published in Science where they found that a third of all 5600 amphibian species are in danger of extinction. 25% have so little data that we have no idea what's happening with them. A bunch more are about to be in danger of extinction. So amphibians around the globe are in trouble. If you don't want to do anything, keep in mind that amphibians are important in controlling crop pests, disease vectors such as mosquitos, and are the food for many other organisms in the food chain. In fact, in many places where there have been declines, there have been problems with increased crop pests. Undoing damage we have done by spreading a fungus around the world is not a bad thing when you look at what happens if we don't.

Your thesis would be correct if evolution worked that quickly, or if all the unfilled niches could then be filled by the few that remain. At sites in Panama, researchers have gone from seeing over 200 animals per night to under 20 in less than two weeks when chytrid appeared. That doesn't leave much in the way of diversity to fill in the gaps.

people in general are considered a cause, yes, including researchers. But, we didn't identify chytrid (this form of chytrid, chytrid fungi are actually a whole mess of fungi, only one parasitizes amphibians) as a problem until 1998. So people were probably spreading it unknowingly until we figured out that it was a problem, yes. Not a big surprise. But saying that not funding any more research is the answer is kind of daft - we are causing global warming, which is causing the expansion of mosquitoes ranges into new areas, expanding the ranges of dengue, malaria, et al. Are you opposed to research into that as well? (Yes I am a biologist, not some tree hugger, but a data-driven, quantitative biologist).

Actually, salamanders get wiped out by chytrid too.