Pesticides + Male Frogs = Female??

I tend to be the type who refuses to buy organic food because it is way out of my price range…after all, the main food supply of the stereotypical college student is 10 cent Top Ramen. Just last week (March 6th) I ran into Ralph’s on a desperate search for a red cabbage that I needed in order to make the acid/base indicator for Expanding Your Horizons that was going to start in two hours. There was, of course, only one red cabbage in the store at 7:30 am and it happened to be organic. I felt slightly robbed as I paid the $2.25 for a small cabbage I was planning to use only a ¼ of, if even that much! The point of that rant is that I’m probably not the only person out there who brushes off the negative effects of pesticides because of cheap price preference. Now, after reading about the multitude of chemicals we subject ourselves to and the detectable presence of a variety of banned pesticides in our fatty tissue, I’m starting to think that organic cabbage might not have been a bad investment…too bad I didn’t actually eat it, I just needed the dye.

One news story that really struck me was the study released from Berkeley about how atrazine (the most common weed killer used on corn) affect frogs. It turns out that exposure to the pesticide causes the male frogs to become infertile or, in about 10% of all cases, turn into female frogs! The genetically altered “she-male” frogs are actually able to reproduce with other male frogs. Now, I don’t know about you, but the fact that a pesticide can turn a frog into a hermaphrodite is a little on the creepy side and a tribute to why copious exposure to pesticides might not be the healthiest lifestyle.

For more on the frog mutations, check out the news report released from UC Berkeley: http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/02/02_pesticides.shtml