While initial susceptibility testing showed frogs and caecilians seemed to be resistant to Bsal infection, it was lethal to many European and some North American salamanders.

This suggests it had originally emerged and co-evolved with salamanders in East Asia, forming its natural reservoir, and was introduced to Europe rather recently through the trade of species such as the fire belly newts as pets.

[8] The description of this pathogen and its aggressiveness raised concern in the scientific community and the public, fearing that it might be a rising threat to Western hemisphere salamanders.

[11] Batrachochytrium is derived from the Greek words batrachos, "frog", and chytra, "earthen pot" (describing the structure that contains unreleased zoospores); salamandrivorans is from the Greek salamandra, "salamander", and Latin vorans, "eating", which refers to extensive skin destruction and rapid death in infected salamanders.

[13] In its introduced range in Europe, it was first detected in the Netherlands in 2012, where it wiped out a majority of the country's small fire salamander population.

[14][15] In Germany, it is primarily known from the states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate, with the core of its range being in the Eifel Mountains, where it has caused landscape-scale declines of fire salamanders.

[16] It was detected in the state of Hesse in 2024, on the border with North Rhine-Westphalia, where it was found to have caused a mass mortality of fire salamanders.

Several other reports of Bsal from other parts of Spain are thought to be false positives, as later surveys of these sites have found no presence of the disease.