New lab study reports male frogs grown in herbicide atrazine can have babies...no, seriously!
Posted March 2, 2010 in Health and the Environment
Are you sitting down? Good. Because a new study by Berkeley Professor Tyrone Hayes is reporting that 10% (N=4) of male frogs raised in atrazine-laced water (2.5 ppb) not only have female sex characteristics, including eggs, but they will attract and successfully mate with normal male frogs!
The most astonishing thing is that this happened with an extremely small amount of atrazine, 2.5 parts per billion (ppb). A ppb is really small, a drop in a large tanker truck. In fact, it is pretty close to the average amount of atrazine that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) allows to contaminate our tap water, which is 3 ppb regulated as an annual average.
NRDC analyzed water monitoring data from EPA and reported that spikes of atrazine lasting days or weeks have been measured in tap water as high as 40 ppb.
Approximately 75 % of stream water and about 40 % of all groundwater samples from agricultural areas tested in an extensive U.S. Geological Survey study contained atrazine.
More on Dr. Hayes study can be found in reports by CNN.com, ScienceNews, and USAToday.com.
