http://www.livescience.com/18634-endangered-rattlesnake-fungal-infection.html
This article is one of many to come I believe. Diseases are detrimental to wildlife and to the will to survive habitat decline and scare resources, human conflicts (in the case of snakes), and now climate change. Reading this article, I realized that this situation is no different than that of the Bubonic Plague that once nearly wiped out an entire human civilization. Once people we so crowed in Europe, they didn't stand a chance against the Black Death. However, the human spirit is resilient and our ancestors prevailed. Hopefully, these threatened rattlesnakes can survive this epidemic; but they lack the population size to withstand it I fear. More times than not, the extinction vortex is too powerful to revive an endangered species. The environment is in a rut as humans have decimated once healthy populations of many different species, forced them to adapt to urbanization, genetically isolated species, we are now dealing with a force too large and unpredictable to help some animals (climate change); not to mention that everyone has a different attitude towards wildlife, so how do we get everyone on the same page? As wildlife biologists, it may seem like ice skating uphill for decades from now, but I am willing to spend my life trying and set the bar high.
