Emerging Mycoses and Fungus-Like Diseases of Vertebrate Wildlife

Many species of vertebrates are susceptible to a large number of diseases caused by infectious agents including viruses, bacteria, true fungi, fungal-like, and other protists and metazoans. The number of reported pathogens causing diseases in vertebrates is rapidly increasing while host populations are rapidly decreasing globally (Fisher et al. 2009). Many of these pathogens are known to be opportunistic, have relatively long-lived environmental stages, infect a wide range of hosts and may have bene efitted from the recent increase in global animal trade and subsequent spread of invasive species (Gozlan et al. 2010; Fisher et al. 2012; Adlard et al. 2015). The spread of invasive species in aquatic systems is well illustrated by the rosette agent Sphareothecum destruens, which has been rapidly spreading all over Europe by an invasive healthy fish host carrier Pseudoasbora parva (Gozlan et al. 2005). Terrestrial zoomycoses such as the bat pathogen Pseudogymnoascus destructans (White-nose Syndrome) and the snake pathogen Ophidiomyces ophidiicola (snake fungal disease) also exhibit factors known to increase disease invasiveness: they infect multiple hosts with a range of susceptibility/resistance (Turner et al. 2011; Allender et al. 2015b), are known to form persistent spores in the environment (Lorch et al. 2013; Reynolds et al. 2015) and/or show signs of saprotrophic ability, which could permit growth outside the host (Raudabaugh and Miller 2013; Reynolds and Barton 2014; Allender et al. 2015b). In this chapter, we focus on newly discovered and recently studied fungi and funguslike protists that cause disease in fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals.