Amphibians as
indicators
Amphibians as indicators of
environmental health and their contribution to humanity
Amphibians
profoundly enhance our lives and our world in countless ways. They provide vital
biomedicines, including compounds that are being refined for analgesics,
antibiotics, stimulants for heart attack victims, and treatments for diverse
diseases including depression, stroke, seizures, Alzheimer’s, and cancer. The
Australian red-eyed treefrog (Litoria chloris) and relatives give us a compound
capable of preventing HIV infection, the cause of AIDS.
Amphibians’
thin skins help them drink and breathe, but also make them susceptible to
environmental contaminants, particularly agricultural, industrial, and
pharmaceutical chemicals. For example, atrazine is the most widely used
herbicide in the US with an estimated 61 to 73 million pounds used per year
during the 1990s. Scientific studies have found that atrazine may cause a
variety of cancers and act as an endocrine disruptor, mimicking the feminizing
hormone estrogen and harming human and animal reproductive and hormone systems.
Atrazine is generally applied in spring and can accumulate in amphibian breeding
pools. Laboratory studies have shown that atrazine can chemically sterilize
tadpoles at levels well below the EPA maximum allowable level for drinking
water. Although lawsuits brought against the EPA by the Natural Resources
Defense Council date back to 1999, the EPA announced on October 31 2003 that it
had negotiated a deal with industry that would not require any new restrictions
on atrazine use.
Other
organochlorine pollutants (e.g., DDT, PCBs, dioxins) can also act as endocrine
disruptors, inducing similar feminizing effects in amphibians. It has been
demonstrated that these responses are occurring in nature, but it is yet unclear
what long-term effect they will have on wild populations.
Amphibians have
been likened to canaries in the coal mine: just as miners used sensitive
canaries to warn them of toxic gases in the mines, amphibians might be warning
us of unsafe environmental conditions that could eventually seriously impact our
health. Could we be similarly affected by these widespread endocrine disruptors,
or are we already? Atrazine, for example, has been detected in more than 1
million Americans' drinking water at levels higher than EPA's drinking water
standard. Some human studies suggest that the average sperm count of adult men
in certain populations is significantly decreased, as much as 50% of what it was
two generations ago. Are we also suffering the same feminizing effects of
agrochemicals, industrial waste, and other estrogen-mimics that we see affecting
amphibians so drastically?
Amphibians are
also vital components of their ecosystems. In the 1970s, it was discovered that
the northern redback salamander (Plethodon cinereus) was possibly the most
abundant vertebrate in eastern US forests, exceeding the biomass of all the bird
or mammal species combined. Amphibians feed primarily on insects and other
invertebrates. It was estimated that a single population of ~1,000 cricket frogs
(Acris crepitans) could consume almost five million invertebrates in one year
Clearly they serve as significant predators of small invertebrates, as abundant
prey for larger predators, and as a vital link in the food web between the two.
In areas of the world where amphibians have declined, there has been an increase
in invertebrate pests that damage crops and that carry human diseases.
Amphibians have
also played a vital role in human culture. While in some cultures frogs and
toads have been despised and regarded as evil, other cultures have embraced them
as life-giving keepers of the rains or agents of fertility and good luck. Some
simply use them for food. Amphibians have been both cherished and persecuted by
different cultures as characters in fantasy stories, ingredients in folk
medicine, and as spiritual beings.
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