Chemicals turning frogs gay

And Rohr's research has found that atrazine could exert indirect effects : At levels found in water throughout the U. Herbicides like atrazine are now found in 57 percent of U. Geological Survey. In previous studies "if we got hermaphrodites, there was no way to know if they were males with ovaries or females with testes," Hayes says.

[1]. Plus, the researchers used frogs bearing only the ZZ sex chromosomes of male African clawed frogs.

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Alex Jones gained significant attention for ranting about chemicals turning frogs gay. And four of the treated frogs actually turned female, going so far as to mate with other males and produce viable eggs despite being genetically male.

As a result, 30 of the frogs were chemically castrated, incapable of reproducing, among other impacts. Critics, such as biologist Werner Kloas of Humboldt University in Berlin, charge that samples may have been contaminated by endocrine disruptors like bisphenol A BPA leaching from plastic containers or introduced during screening.

In the present study, we examined the long-term effects of atrazine exposure on reproductive development and function in an all-male population of African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis), generated by crossing ZZ females (sex-reversed genetic males) to ZZ males (SI Materials and Methods).

He says he currently has "no running experiment with Syngenta or any further chemical company. Whereas another four of the treated frogs apparently resisted atrazine's effects, the rest "lacked male reproductive behavior, had reduced male features, and severely reduced sperm and low fertility," Hayes says.

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. For his part, Kloas in the past reviewed atrazine's effects for Syngenta and found no impact on African clawed frogs at up to micrograms per liter of atrazine and no genetic impact at 25 micrograms per liter.

Somekilograms of the herbicide fall with the rain each year, sometimes up to 1, kilometers from the source. By David Biello. The claim was popularized by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who cited studies on the herbicide atrazine, known to induce spontaneous sex reversal or hermaphroditism in certain frog species, to assert that the U.S.

government was "putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay" as part of a "chemical warfare operation". The bountiful fields of the U. Some 36 million kilograms of the odorless, white powder are applied on farms to control grassy weeds. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Pesticide atrazine can turn : has a history of repeatedly sharing unfounded conspiracies that man-made chemicals in the environment could be making children gay or

The key may be aromatase, a protein that spurs the production of the female hormone estrogen, causing originally male gonads to become ovaries and whose production is spurred by atrazine. All that atrazine may be having another effect: turning male frogs female.

Hayes has a long history studying atrazinestarting in the s with research funded by its maker, now known as Syngenta, that first raised the prospect that the herbicide might be a interfering with the natural hormones of animals, including humans. The Truth About Alex Jones, Atrazine & “Gay Frogs” If you found us by searching for Alex Jones frogs, gay frogs, or Alex Jones frog shirts, you’re in the right place—because it’s time to separate fact from fiction.

A barrage of studies on such endocrine disruption have followed—some confirming that amphibians such as frogs are suffering from an atrazine onslaught, others finding no effect, and some even finding evidence of reduced sperm count in men from agricultural regions of the U.

This study is not likely to be the last word in the controversy, however. Berkeley, rather than an unaffiliated scientific reviewer as is more common. He also questions the single exposure level, lack of measurement of female hormone levels in the affected frogs, and the use of ethanol in the water solution "as they claim atrazine is easily water soluble and it is better to avoid any solvent if feasible.

One of the mostly widely used weed killers, atrazine, may be disrupting male frogs' sexual development--even reversing it.