One of the world's most popular pesticides, atrazine, chemically castrates male frogs and in some instances changes them into completely functionally females, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors conclude that atrazine likely plays a large, but unsuspected role in the current global amphibian crisis.
To study how atrazine impacts frogs, researchers studied the long-term effects of the pesticide on an all-male group forty of African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis).
Even though they exposed the frogs to a low doze (2.5 parts per billion, i.e. ppb) of the pesticide, the researchers found that 10 percent of the animals became full-fledged females due to exposure to the pesticide, capably even of breeding successfully with males. The other 90 percent of the exposed males were demasculinized, suffering from decreased testosterone, low fertility, and an inability to outcompete non-exposed males in breeding.
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