AMPHIBIAN WARFARE
DOHERTY, BRIAN
AMPHIBIAN WARFARE by Brian Doherty You can understand why they created an environmental panic, those deformed frogs that have starred in media scare stories since 1995, when a group of them were...
...As far as frogs and salamanders with extra limbs, it's safe to conclude that we know parasites are causing it," he says...
...Stanley Sessions, author of one of the Science papers and a developmental biologist at Hartwick College in upstate New York, is feeling a measure of vindication...
...There is nothing intrinsically alarming about a malformed frog...
...The parasite findings haven't completely solved the mystery of frog deformities...
...The new studies indicate that natural, not man-made, causes are to blame...
...In this case, the crusade comes in the form of a multi-agency federal task force led by the Department of the Interior (with representatives from the Departments of Justice, State, and Defense—they are ready for anything) and cutely acronymed TADD, the Task-force on Amphibian Declines and Deformities...
...Flatworm parasites known as trematodes, present almost everywhere snails are present, can attack tadpoles and cause almost all the observed natural deformities in frogs...
...It's a small appropriation, relatively speaking...
...A frog's front legs form in gill sacs, protected from parasites but bathed in the water that man-made chemicals supposedly contaminate...
...He speculates that natural predators may play a role: fish, and sometimes fellow frogs, bite at tadpoles, often clipping off developing limbs...
...Not to mention, a lot of people now have a financial and professional stake in the hype...
...They looked bizarre...
...Brian Doherty is the Warren Brookes fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute...
...Surely, industrial civilization was somehow responsible for the alarming amphibians...
...One of the Science studies not only showed that the parasites could cause the deformities in labs, but found them living alongside deformed frogs in California...
...To prove the frog-pesticide link, a sizable federal research project was launched, and a small army of federally funded researchers, investigative journalists, and volunteer environmentalists have subsequently descended on the frog ponds of America...
...And don't expect Congress, either, to cut the legs out from under Capt...
...And in the modern tradition of environmental scare stories, which tend to double as morality plays, both government and the media went hunting for their favorite culprit—Man...
...The implication: Let's not abandon the more alarming scenarios until we have to...
...Herpetologists are mostly so delighted to get on the government gravy train that the hunt for the killer chemical is apt to continue...
...AMPHIBIAN WARFARE by Brian Doherty You can understand why they created an environmental panic, those deformed frogs that have starred in media scare stories since 1995, when a group of them were first discovered in a Minnesota pond by schoolchildren on a field trip...
...Babbitt's science adviser William Brown, who in February informed BNA Daily Environment that "there are a whole set of regulatory initiatives" planned to respond to the frog crisis, hasn't been deterred by the parasite studies...
...It's almost embarrassing and alarming if we can't figure this out," Sessions says...
...But despite the trouble it can cause to tadpoles in labs, no one managed to prove that frogs in the wild had been unduly radiated...
...It looks like parasites are important in the deformations in the ponds in Santa clara county," (where one of the researchers concentrated...
...Extra limbs and missing limbs were the most common defects, and there was the rare monster with eyes grotesquely misplaced inside the mouth...
...Ribbitt...
...The reason the frogs have become an obsession of environmentalists and the subject of millions of dollars of government funded research is an often stated notion that frogs are uniquely sensitive to environmental harm—"canaries in the coal mine," in the popular phrase...
...The biology of the frogs and the parasites, everything we know about the development of amphibian limbs—it all forms a consistent, comprehensive story...
...And more and more of it, too...
...I'm not even 100 percent certain there's any increase in deformities," he says...
...This point is usually simply asserted and is not necessarily scientifically valid...
...Brown told the Los Angeles Times, "I don't think there's any single answer...
...Missing limbs are still not well explained...
...Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has already requested an extra $8.1 million, for a total of $9 million, for fiscal 2000 frog research...
...A natural explanation—a fungus called chytrid—has recently come to the fore in that field as well...
...Sessions first reported the parasite-deformity link in a 1990 paper he thinks was unjustly ignored in the media's rush to make frogs into mankind's victims...
...Like all good modern crusades, this one has a web site, www.frogweb.gov, where you can find a cartoon mascot called capt...
...But hey, who wants to complain when the federal government is passing out research money...
...one suspects he would not blithely suggest, if retinoid pesticides were found causing deformities in a Santa Clara County pond, that maybe this was just a local phenomenon...
...Like many chemicals, retinoids can cause birth defects in high concentrations...
...Don't expect the scientific controversy created by those Science articles to slow the government's search for a man-made cause...
...But whether or not they are useful leading indicators of environmental disaster, frogs are undeniably photogenic, and make good poster creatures for a crusade...
...Ultraviolet radiation (because profligate use of sprayon deodorants and other aerosols had depleted atmospheric ozone) was the first suspect...
...A pair of reports that appeared earlier this month in Science magazine should put the brakes on this growth industry in frog deformities...
...Some herpetologists, immune to the appeal of animated amphibians, privately complain about splashing amateurs rampaging through the habitats of possibly endangered frogs...
...Ribbitt, who purports to be the "Ambassador from Planet Amphibian," exhorting the children of Earth to "get involved in finding the cause, and become a friend to frogs everywhere...
...The humble frog suddenly stands for a whole new kind of green for researchers willing to focus on the right answers—answers that condemn industrial civilization for deformities that in all likelihood are just Mother Nature's own freak show...
...As the name indicates, the government's efforts are also aimed at the separate, though sometimes conflated, phenomenon of frog die-offs—frogs not appearing in some typical habitats in expected numbers...
...Unfortunately, he sees research taking a backseat to hype and hysteria, spread by the media and on the Internet, by alarmists unwilling to accept natural explanations like parasites and predators for seemingly weird missing limbs...
...of course, something must be to blame...
...All the natural history falls into place...
...There's certainly an increase in reports of deformities, but whether that's because of an increase in time spent looking or a true increase in incidence we don't know...
...So pesticides became the favored explanation, particularly those of the retinoid class—a class including Vitamin A, and one used in many popular medicines and cosmetics...
...since frogs have no palate, it's fairly simple for the developing eyes to get moved into the mouth...
...What's more, most frog deformities are in the back legs, which parasites can readily attack...
...Parasite damage to tadpoles can even cause the adult frog's eyes to develop somewhere they aren't supposed to...
Vol. 4 • May 1999 • No. 34
