Thursday, March 04, 2010

SEX CHANGE WEEDKILLER












“Last week I was a boy.”

The atrocities we humans are inflicting on our fellow species pile up so fast we need wings to stay above them (to paraphrase the good Captain Willard.) This is one of the most recent stories of what we’re doing to frogs…

“Atrazine, one of the most commonly used and controversial weedkillers, can turn male frogs into females, researchers reported on Monday. The experiment is the first to show such complete effects of atrazine, which had been known to disrupt hormones and which is one of the chief suspects in the decline of amphibians such as frogs around the world. "Atrazine-exposed males were both demasculinized (chemically castrated) and completely feminized as adults," Tyrone Hayes of the University of California Berkeley and colleagues wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The chemical had been shown to disrupt development and make frogs develop both male and female features -- termed hermaphroditism. This study of 40 male frogs shows the process can go even further, Hayes said. "Before, we knew we got fewer males than we should have, and we got hermaphrodites. Now, we have clearly shown that many of these animals are sex-reversed males, Atrazine has caused a hormonal imbalance that has made them develop into the wrong sex, in terms of their genetic constitution.” (Click here for more.)

Meanwhile, in Australia, it’s raining fish…
“Lajamanu, a small community in the Northern Territory of Australia, has experienced a “rain of fishes.” Hundreds of spangled perch, some frozen, some still alive, fell from the sky onto the desert community.”

The secret word is Ribbet

4 comments:

Tuonela said...

You know, SEX CHANGE WEEDKILLER would make a great band name.

Diamond Jim said...

They could cover Sonny Boy Williamson II's "Fattening Frogs For Snakes."

Sam L. said...

I have had it with these motherfucking blues singers on this motherfucking plane!

Lyle Hopwood said...

There's a great Kills song about weedkiller. Her man becomes an ugly tree, so she goes in search of said weedkiller.

wv is hantsi