Are frogs turning gay

The difference in sex ratios he’d observed stemmed from the fact that rural ponds had, in fact, too many males.

How did these different sex ratios come to be? He said the connection makes sense…

DEVORE: …but we can’t prove it because we can’t experiment on human beings.

And there are consequences. Researchers concluded that chemical exposures cause “sex-reversal,” leading to skewed sex ratios — too many females!

No one knows for sure, but some believe that rising rates of one birth defect could be an indicator.

[CAFETERIA SOUNDS AT OAKLAND CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL]

AHEARN: Dr. Laurence Baskin is a pediatric urologist with the University of California, San Francisco but he practices here at the Oakland Children’s Hospital part time. Producer Ashley Ahearn reports.

[DOOR OF FROG LAB ROOM OPENS, VENTILATOR FAN RUNNING]

HAYES: So these are the South African Claw frog.

[WATER SLOSHING IN TANK]

AHEARN: Tyrone Hayes peers into a large gray fiberglass tank like a little boy looking for critters in a tide pool.

This isn’t just about how you get good sensation in your body. Max had questioned several assumptions that well-meaning biologists had previously left unquestioned, namely: 1.) that queer sex among frogs is unnatural, 2.) that tadpole sex changes are unnatural, and 3.) that intersexed frogs are not only unnatural but also cannot reproduce.

But she was certain that there had to be a way both to conduct research and express alarm over toxic environmental pollution, all without naturalizing stereotypical and binary human gender roles across different animal species.

An eventual cross-disciplinary collaboration between Max and Melina — they’re on a first-name basis now — made more explicit the queer approach that Max’s previous research had, in some ways, implicitly adopted.

And perhaps because most hypospadias can be corrected with surgery, very few doctors have raised questions about the underlying causes of this birth defect.

But endocrine disrupting chemicals show up in almost 100 percent of the population, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and many of these chemicals are known to disrupt normal reproductive system development in animals - think back to Tyrone Hayes' frogs here.

So I asked Dr.

Theo Colborn, who's been studying endocrine disruptors for over 30 years, if she thought our environmental exposures could be affecting our reproductive health. Studies on rats, reptiles and even human cells exposed to atrazine showed similar results. Recent studies also found a possible link between human birth defects and low birth weight and atrazine exposure in the womb.

As a result of these studies, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is reviewing its regulations on use of the pesticide.

Tyrone Hayes says just because frogs aren’t people that doesn’t mean we should ignore the warnings.

HAYES: People go, well, it’s frogs. Or more specifically, given what we’re seeing with hypospadias, I asked her, do you think we are feminizing our baby boys?

COLBORN: I definitely do. The cosmetics.

Other biologists also noted male-male sexual encounters among chemically-exposed frogs (primarily in the laboratory), and interpreted this same-sex sexual behavior as evidence of chemical-induced harm.

Lambert’s 2010s research on American green frogs fit right into this pattern. We’ve done this, others have done this. One particularly present assumption focused on hormone-interfering chemicals and their purported effects on sexualized behaviors.

The assumption goes like this.

Regardless of chemical exposure, American green frog tadpoles were “just switching sex pretty much everywhere,” which could lead to the presence of egg-producing cells in testes. What is more, intersex frogs could still produce offspring, contrary to concerned biologists’ claims that the presence of “transgender” frogs necessarily signaled species decline.

So as Lambert put it, tadpoles that switch sex are “making it to adulthood, becoming sexually viable, and reproducing successfully.

So their fertility is as low as 10 percent in some cases, and that is only if we isolate those animals and pair them with females,” he said. Dr. Stephen Rosenthal, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California San Francisco, broke down some basic human developmental biology for me.