TRANSCRIPT ♪ GINA: Frogs are beautiful animals. My earliest memories with frogs, they were very abundant. They were very common, nowadays they are not.
What amphibians are going through, it's been described as a mass extinction and they're going extinct in every part of the world. To be able to apply the tools we have developed to conserve these species, it's a very important contribution for amphibian conservation. My vision for amphibians is to see them thrive again.
♪ NARRATOR: In Central America, right next to the Panama Canal, lies a Noah's Ark of frogs. These former shipping containers hold an irreplaceable treasure: creatures that no longer exist in the wild. BRIAN: The Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project is based in the town of Gamboa at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
NARRATOR: Simply nicknamed, the Ark, it houses one of the most advanced amphibian breeding facilities on the planet. It's a refuge from a pandemic that scientists, like Gina Della Togna, have been fighting for decades. GINA: This is the most threatened class of vertebrates.
There are other threats, of course, habitat destruction, but when you add disease to that, it makes a fatal combination. (frogs croaking) NARRATOR: Alarm bells first sounded in the 1970s when amphibians began dying in droves all over the world. It took more than 20 years - until 1998 - before scientists confirmed the culprit.
A fungus that causes a deadly disease known as chytridiomycosis, or chytrid for.
