Author Topic: 10-Limbed Frogs! - Because of contamination with fertilizers  (Read 1124 times)

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10-Limbed Frogs! - Because of contamination with fertilizers
« on: September 29, 2007, 02:02:51 AM »
10-Limbed Frogs! - Because of contamination with fertilizers
By: Stefan Anitei, Science Editor - Softpedia


Malformation induced by Ribeiroa

You fertilize a plantation to grow bigger and have more fruits, tubers, leaves and so on. But frogs around get "fertilized" too, developing horrific deformities. Nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers and animal waste leaking into lakes and ponds are the cause of this phenomenon. They boost the populations of a parasitic flatworm, Ribeiroia ondatrae, causeing these deformities in North American frogs.

"You can get five or six extra limbs. You can get no hind limbs. You can get all kinds of really bizarre, sick and twisted stuff," said lead researcher Pieter Johnson, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

This discovery is important in the context of the world's already menaced amphibian populations, and humans are the main responsible factor. "We continue to see malformed amphibians all over the place and yet very little is being done to address those questions or even understand them," Johnson said.

The parasite was known to induce deformities in frogs, but the new research shows how this is boosted by farming runoff. The nutrients entering the water induce eutrophication and stimulate the algal growth; more algae means more snails feeding on them. The microscopic trematode worm larvae infect the snails, and more snails means they have a higher chance of encountering a host and ultimately, more worms. "When their eggs hatch, the parasites have to find a snail within 12 hours or else they die", explains Johnson.

The worms multiply asexually inside the snails, castrating them. Each snail releases thousands of larvae. The larvae then swarm over tadpoles, dug into their skin and if they burrow into the buds where limbs will develop, forming cysts, they will induce an impaired development and deformities. "Predators such as birds eat the infected frogs and spread the worm back into the ecosystem through defecation. Deformed frogs are more easily caught and eaten, benefiting the worm's lifecycle", said Johnson.

The team tested the role of nitrogen and phosphorus runoff into 36 artificial ponds in Wisconsin, filled with snails, frog tadpoles, (and in some) nitrogen and phosphorus. The pools with supplementary nitrogen and phosphorus (200 mg/l) experienced a boom in their snail population (by 50 %), parasitic worm egg production (by 300 %) and malformed frogs (by 200-500 %). "The amount of phosphorus that runs from rivers into the oceans has increased about three-fold since the industrialization of agriculture.", Johnson also said.

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