Cryptococcosis is a systemic mycosis with a global distri­bution, predominantly caused by fungi of the Cryptococ­cus neoformans and C. gattii species complexes (Kwon-Chung et al. 2017).

Other species of the genus Cryptococcus (e.g. C. albidus, C. Iaurentii) rarely cause disease in mammals and to date none have been recorded in Australian wildlife. Members of these species com­plexes have a dichotomous mating type system (as opposed to many other fungi that have numerous mating types) and the capacity to reproduce by (i) sexual repro­duction (opposite-sex mating and same-sex mating to form basidiospores 1-2 μm diameter) and (ii) asexual reproduction (i.e. budding of daughter cells [Heitman et al. 2013]). In the diseased host, organisms exists in tissues in the yeast form, whereas in the environment they are thought to exist as either a monokaryotic or dikaryotic filamentous fungi (Mitchell et al. 2011)

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