Now we seem to have moved to its actual extinction. The planet is permanently changed. This frog’s ecological role among the animals and plants with which it evolved has been lost, along with whatever other secrets it carried.

Extinction is one of the realities of the new geologic age we inhabit, the human-driven Anthropocene. The origin of the fungal infection that doomed the Rabbs’ frog remains unknown, though its rise clearly seems linked to the global trade in amphibians.

Snakes, bees, starfish, corals, great apes and bats are suffering similar incursions and have become victims of pathogens spread unwittingly by human travel, commerce and other activities. These emerging infectious diseases have become a hallmark of our age.

The chytrid fungi proved to be particularly intractable, and the United States government was slow to take steps to effectively regulate the cross-border trade in amphibians. The government has since become more aggressive in trying to halt the spread of yet another infection that has devastated salamander populations in Europe but not yet made it into the United States, home to the world’s greatest biodiversity of those amphibians.

The trajectory of this latest threat is familiar: Asian salamanders popular as pets were found to carry this fungus without getting sick, but it proved lethal to wild salamanders in Europe.

Fortunately, some populations of amphibians now appear to be evolving tolerance to these novel chytrid fungi, so they are recovering despite our own too-little, too-late, too-uninformed conservation efforts. For other populations, captive breeding programs are helping to usher some species through the storm of diseases.

Amphibians have shown us that reactive attempts in conservation may be ineffective. Indeed, the demise of so many amphibians was one of our early indications of what many biologists believe is a sixth major extinction now underway.