Snakehead fish are large, freshwater predators from the Channidae family that are native to Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia and various locations throughout Asia. These fish are plentiful in their native waters as there are some 28 varieties of snakehead fish.

The snakehead fish is very unique and different from the average fish. While they are similar, in body-type, to muscular eels, some snakehead varieties can grow to at least four feet in length. This fish got its name because of its stereotypically flat, snake-like head and toothed mouth.

What really make the snakehead so unique is its voracious appetite and its ability to breathe air. This fish is so adaptable, in fact, that it can travel short distances across land and live for short stents of time out of the water.

While there have been reports of snakeheads attacking and killing humans, they usually settle for fish, amphibians and small mammals. However, at least one species of snakehead, the Channa micropeltes, has been known to attack people when they approached the snakehead’s nest or their young.

Photo by Brian Gratwiche via Creative Commons

Over the years, these superb predators have found their way into the lakes and rivers of the United States, and this is where the problem of introducing a very adaptable, fierce predator into a new environment begins. The northern snakehead, or Channa argus, have been brought into the United States for two main reasons. There were going to be used as freshwater aquarium fish and as a specialty food.

It is reported that the northern snakeheads found in American waters are either illegally stocked in an effort to establish a local food source or aquarium owners eventually released the fish after they no longer wanted to or could care for them properly. Once introduced into their new homes, these fish tend to flourish.

Photo by marcuspajp via Creative Commons

In fact, there are several species of Channidae that can tolerate a wide range of water temperatures. So, neither the warm waters of the south nor the cold waters of the north would prevent many snakeheads from becoming an established, yet undesirable, new resident.

Once established, these fish can expand their range by swimming to adjoining waterways or can even move short distances over land to nearby sources of water. The adaptability of these fish is not the only thing that makes them such a threat. The northern snakehead also breeds extremely easily.

Combine the northern snakehead’s adaptability, carnivorous appetitive, the ability to move over land and a lack of natural enemies, and you end up with a real and present threat to American waterways and the indigenous species of aquatic life that resides in these waters.

While this might not seem like a very significant environmental threat, the impact of releasing a pet snakehead or a food fish into local waters where that fish is not native is real.

Photo by Ton MJ via Creative Commons

With no natural enemies in U.S. waters, the snakehead’s prolific breeding habits and hardy constitutions create a real potential for snakehead fish to multiply and destroy entire populations of fish and amphibians in the waters in which they are released. Many of these fish and amphibians are already on the endangered species list, and the snakeheads can only make things worse.

Consider this: At all stages of life, the northern snakehead competes with native fish and other aquatic wildlife for food. Native fish and wildlife populations, which already rely upon smaller fish, crustaceans, frogs, snakes, lizards and young waterfowl, will have to compete with these top-predators, and this could put them in great danger.

If snakeheads become established in a specific body of water, they can disrupt the ecosystem’s predator-prey balance. This can be catastrophic for native species.

Additionally, when a new species is introduced to an already established body of water, there is always the potential of the species bringing new diseases and parasites along with it. And, it does not appear that only large populations of snakeheads create environmental problems for American waterways. Even just one snakehead poses a threat because of its voracious feeding behavior.

In 2002, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service added snakeheads to the list of “injurious fish.” This means that snakeheads are prohibited from being imported into the United States.

Many states now even prohibit the possession of live snakeheads. However, these bans have not completely stopped illegal snakehead-activities, which have been recorded in most of the states where bans are in place. It is also reported that snakeheads can still be obtained over the internet.

Photo by Yai&JR via Creative Commons

If snakeheads are found in the wild, the only means of eradicating the population would involve the complete eradication of the fishery with a piscicide, a chemical substance which is poisonous to fish. While this can be effective in small, isolated bodies of water, it does not generally work in large lakes or river systems.

This is what officials in Crofton, Maryland decided to do when northern snakeheads were discovered by anglers in 2002. This first Maryland snakehead was a long, skinny fish about 18 inches from end to end.

Photo by wharman via Creative Commons

Because the fisherman didn’t recognize the strange fish, he took a picture of it and put it back in the pond. Later, he gave the photo to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR). Sure enough, the fish was identified as a snakehead.

It wasn’t until another angler caught a snakehead in the same pond and netted some babies that officials really became concerned. Their concern was based on the fact that a heavy rain could possibly wash some snakeheads from the pond and into a nearby river, which runs through a National Wildlife Refuge and on to the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in North America. Because of this, authorities acted quickly.

To eliminate the snakehead menace, Maryland wildlife officials dumped the piscicide rotenone into Crofton Pond. This succeeded in killing all of its fish. Six adult snakeheads and greater than 1,000 juveniles went belly-up, along with all of the pond’s native fish.. They thought the snakehead problem was solved.

Two years later, northern snakeheads reared their heads again, and this time they showed up in the Potomac River. Experts worried that snakeheads in the Potomac, by eating other fish or out-competing them for food, could drive down numbers of more desirable species, such as largemouth bass and shad.

Poison just wasn’t an option this time. You can dump poison in a little, enclosed pond, but you can’t very easily contaminate the entire Potomac in order to kill the snakeheads. It’s a wide, shallow river that originates in West Virginia and runs 380 miles before emptying into the Chesapeake Bay.

The Bay fuels the region’s economy through recreation and fishing. Snakeheads couldn’t survive in the mildly salty water of the Bay, but they could scarf down shad, fish that spawn in the Potomac and other freshwater tributaries. The complete eradication of the snakehead population would be nearly impossible.

To date, northern snakeheads have been found in U.S. waters in several states. One example was a snakehead that was hooked in North Carolina’s Paw Creek. This fish weighed 12.5 pounds and measured about 31 inches.

Because it is illegal to return a live snakehead fish to an American body of water, the fish was turned over to the Wildlife Resources Commission. However, this was not the first, and probably not the last, time a northern snakehead fish was caught in North Carolina.
Snakeheads have been caught in this area in 2002 and 2007. And, Paw Creek is an environmentally-dangerous place to have these fish because it straddles two lakes giving the injurious fish a lot of room to expand and invade.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Fisheries staff also responded to a report by a local angler of an invasive species in Catlin Creek near Ridgebury Lake in the town of Waywayanda.

The DEC recognized the danger of an infestation of northern snakehead fish. Left unchecked this predatory, invasive fish can rapidly expand its population and territory with real and negative economic impacts to the Hudson River watershed fisheries. Not to mention the fact that it can cause potentially irreversible harm to the rare and endangered species in the area.

Because of this threat, the DEC took immediate action in an attempt at containing the snakehead spread by erecting temporary fish barriers in Catlin Creek. DEC determined that swift action to eradicate this species is essential in protecting the native fish and amphibian populations and in preventing any further expansion of Northern Snakeheads beyond the headwaters of Catlin Creek.

It doesn’t appear that there is a quick fix to the Northern Snakehead problem. The key to managing snakeheads is to prevent them from becoming an established species in the first place. This may be difficult since they are already in U.S. waters and there numbers seem to be on the rise.

But, the vast reservoir was built for far more than recreation. In fact, the massive Hoover Dam, which was completed in 1935, provides this desert region and surrounding states with a reliable water supply from the Colorado River as well as an excellent and inexpensive source of electricity.

Covering the state lines of Arizona and Nevada, Lake Mead stores water from the vast Colorado River, which runs through a whopping seven states – Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. So, to say that Lake Mead and the irreplaceable Colorado River are important to the citizens of the western states, would be a huge understatement.

However, for the past decade Lake Mead has been battling the worst 10-year drought in recorded history along the Colorado River, which feeds the 110-mile-long reservoir.

Since 1999, Lake Mead has dropped about 1 percent a year. It is estimated that by 2012, the lake’s surface could fall below the existing pipe that delivers 40 percent of Las Vegas’s water.

In 2000, the water level at Lake Mead was 1,214 feet, close to its all-time high, but it has been dropping ever since. When Lake Mead was built during the 1920s and 1930s, the western United States was experiencing one of the wettest periods of the past 1,200 years.

Even today, our so-called drought is still wetter than the average precipitation for the area averaged over centuries. In other words, for the past 75 years, we’ve had more moisture than we ever realized. And, we definitely took it for granted.

Farmers have been growing rice by flooding arid farmland with water from Lake Mead,  desert community residents have been maintaining lush front lawns, and avid golfers depend on green, healthy courses in areas where temperatures typically exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer.

A combination of a solid demand for Lake Mead’s thirst-quenching water and an ever-changing climate has resulted in a 100 foot drop in Mead’s water level since 2000. While that might not look like a great deal of water loss because it is just 10 percent under the lake’s 1983 high water mark, we have to remember that Lake Mead is like a martini glass.

The vast reservoir is wide at the top but narrow at the bottom. So that 10 percent loss of water actually represents a loss of half of Lake Mead’s water supply. This huge loss happened in just nine years – The lake went form 96 percent capacity to roughly 43 percent.

Amazingly, when full, Lake Mead can hold an astonishing 9.3 trillion gallons of water. This is an amount equal to the water that flows through the Colorado River in a two-year period.

And, this is water that is put to good use. Lake Mead’s life-sustaining water is used for many things. It irrigates a million acres of crops throughout the western United States and Mexico, and the reservoir supplies water to tens of millions of people.

The massive and mighty Hoover Dam generates enough electricity to power approximately a half-million homes. But that’s not all. The power from Hoover Dam is also used to transport water up and across the Sierra Nevada Mountains on its way to Southern California.

But, however, the lake continues to shrink. Lake Mead’s water level fell 14 feet last year, and the Bureau of Reclamation has projected the level will drop 14 more feet this summer. That will bring it perilously close to 1,075 feet, the point at which the federal government can step in and declare a drought condition, forcing a reduction of 400,000 acre-feet drawn from Lake Mead per year.

A typical Las Vegas home uses a half acre-foot of water per year, so such a reduction would be equal to turning the tap off for 800,000 households.
Going beyond the implications for residents living in areas supplied by Lake Mead, the water loss has ramifications for the local economy too. It was recently estimated that Lake Mead National Recreation Area, along with affiliated marine operators, were losing some where in the neighborhood of three million dollars for every ten foot of lake lost to this devastating drought.

Currently, Lake Mead’s water level is hanging close to 1095.26 feet above sea level. The end-of-year projection is now predicting that Lake Mead will drop several more feet below its current level. This is a huge loss considering the lake is considered full at 1,219 feet.

The year 2009 started out well as officials projected that Lake Mead could receive an additional one million acre-feet of water based on the snowpack in the Rocky Mountains. Unfortunatly, however, the thaw did not translate into the expected runoff, and Lake Mead and the Colorado River’s water shortage problem marched on.

In 2008, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography issued their “When Will Lake Mead Go Dry?” report. The report said there is a 50 percent chance that Lake Mead will dry up by the year 2021. If this happens, it could mean no more water, no more pumping and no more electricity for many, many people.

There is, however, some good news. Strong conservation efforts are helping this serious condition. For example, Southern Nevada has significantly reduced its water draw from 325,000 acre-feet a year in 2000 to 265,000 acre-feet in 2009. Even with this reduction, the grand Colorado River still remains over utilized.

This is easy to see when you consider that millions of acre-feet of H20 are rushed to California, Nevada, and Mexico each year. This continually drains and strains both Lake Mead and neighboring Lake Powell faster than either lake can be replenished.

Some of the conservation solutions and suggestions include “grass buyback” programs to convince residents of the benefits of installing drought-tolerant landscaping, tax incentives for swimming pool-covers as well as the inevitable water rate hikes.

One of the more radical ideas involves pumping water from the eastern United States, where many regions’ rivers have been inundated with extensive flooding, over the Rockies to the western, sweltering states. Another interesting proposal lies beyond the shores of California, where there is a vast, open ocean of water available for desalinization.
While these are possibly viable alternatives, the power and financial requirements for either proposal would be enormous.

Whatever the solution to the Lake Mead water crisis is, it is likely not going to be a simple one. If the drought-like conditions continue, action will likely need to be taken sooner rather than later in order to save the reservoir.

It might be discovered that the money and time it will take to quench the western United States’ thirst are like the water supply. They are all running short.

Apparently, it is true that desperate times call for desperate measures. Reportedly, Beijing’s 17 million residents are now under very limited and restrictive driving, manufacturing and constructing guidelines. These restrictions are all being imposed in an attempt to clean up one very polluted city.

It is reported that major construction is to stop, factories are to be shut down and half the automobiles are to be grounded every day until after the Olympics.

While the Beijing Environmental Bureau said that the air “will be safe, everyone can be at ease,” many athletes, environmentalists as well as authorities from numerous countries attending the Olympics have significant concerns.

Chinese officials, however, contend that safety is of the utmost importance. Officials seem to have a lot of confidence that they can effectively control the country’s air pollution problem, even if that means trying to control Mother Nature herself.

By using possibly the world’s most sophisticated computer system, Chinese authorities are not only watching the weather and wind patterns surrounding Beijing, they are prepared to attempt to try to change what Mother Nature dishes out.

By tracking pollution from as far away as India, China is focusing heavily on surrounding provinces and their big pollution sources. At one steel plant located 300 miles from Beijing, the boss is poised to close the plant if high winds start blowing this distant, but dangerous, faraway pollution into or near Beijing where it would likely be trapped by mountains.

Once the pollution is entrapped by the mountains, the only viable solution would be rain. And, according to Chinese authorities, scientists are prepared to try that too. How would they do this? Simple. Artillery shells filled with a chemical thought to trigger rain showers would be shot into the sky with hopes of rain.

No one, however, can adequately control the weather. So, with apparent good reason, regardless if China says it’s a good-air-quality-day or not, there are many doubters in the crowd.

Consider this. Some pollution monitors have been relocated to the suburbs, where cleaner air can twist daily pollution results and make the overall contamination numbers look better than they really are.

Legitimate concerns for the health of the Olympic athletes and visitors, not to mention the Chinese citizens, remain. While the government has recently spent millions to clean up the city, the pollution problem in China simply cannot be fixed with a few quick, and possibly temporary, fixes.

The City of Beijing has undergone numerous improvements for the games. In fact, the government spent approximately $57 million to renovate more than 5,000 public restrooms. Also, thousands of Olympic volunteers are learning English and the ABCs of interacting with foreigners.

Chinese officials have also taken environmental actions aimed at dissipating Beijing’s air pollution before the games by spending more than $15 billion on drastic antipollution measures, including relocating 200 factories and steel mills outside the city limits.

According to a recent Mother Jones article, China has spent $3.6 billion and taken some extreme steps to clean up the capitol before the summer games. One of the changes China has made is building four new subways in order to encourage more public transportation and cut down on traffic. One million vehicles will also be banned during the Olympics.

However, the truth is that no amount of vitamins, regimens or athletic stamina will prepare many of the world-class competitors for the sort of severe air pollution they will face in Beijing. Numerous health and athletic experts have long been concerned whether athletes’ lungs will be able to adjust to all the smog and chemicals that plague the entire Chinese environment.

While these actions are a great step in the right environmental direction, China needs more than a quick-fix for its crippling environmental issues. According to FinancialNirvana.com, many environmental experts believe China’s problems may be attributed to a weak legal system and corruption, poverty, government policies that put job growth ahead of having a healthy environment as well as two decades of double-digit industrial growth.

In addition to this, Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2006 report notes that acidification has spread to approximately 30% of China’s cropland. The Report also states that China has 16 cities with the worst air pollution in the world.

Even more remarkable and astonishing is the fact that China’s Ministry of Science and Technology estimated that roughly 50,000 of the country’s newborn babies die every year due to the unhealthy consequences of air pollution.

Sometimes it’s the little things that say the most

Consider the latest news of a keel-crippling algae bloom that covered about a third of the Olympic sailing course in Qingdao, China. This algae overgrowth resulted in the deployment of a small army of workers, a large fleet of boats and a full brigade of dump trucks and bulldozers that have been desperately trying to clear up this embarrassing, yet expected, component to China’s assertion of hosting a ‘green games’ Olympics.

What this means is that numerous international competitors desperate for practice have been forced to stay in dry dock until this dangerous mess is cleaned up. While this kind of environmental roadblock may be foreign to many Olympic competitors, it is far from atypical in the world’s most polluted nation.

Today, fully 70% of China’s seven major rivers are severely and dangerously polluted. In addition, 80% of its rivers fail to meet standards for fishing and 90% of China’s cities suffer from some degree of significant water pollution. What this means for those who live in China is that over 700 million Chinese drink fetid water of a quality well below World Health Organization’s standards.

Meanwhile, liver and stomach cancers related to water pollution are among the leading causes of death in the Chinese countryside. And, 21 cities along the Yellow River are now characterized by the highest measurable levels of deadly pollution.

As for this particularly extensive algal bloom in Qingdao, the cause is clear — a massive misuse of agricultural fertilizer. A not-so-well-known-fact is that China is the world’s largest fertilizer user, consuming more than 50 million tons each year.

This problem is exacerbated by untrained peasants applying far too much fertilizer to their meager plots with the false hopes and dreams of boosting their already scanty yields. The obvious result has been a new kind of flooding crisis — a flood of excess and unneeded fertilizer runoff that ultimately ends up flooding into neighboring rivers and streams.

With this toxic runoff mixture, fertilizer nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphates have triggered an explosion of algal blooms as part of a broader process of eutrophication. This eutrophication process quite literally sucks the oxygen out of the water and kills all of the plant, fish and aquatic life.

The obvious catastrophic environmental result is an extremely foul-smelling and murky body of water incapable of sustaining life.

Another perfect example of this algal bloom epidemic is the blooms that keep pounding China’s third-largest lake, Lake Tai. This notable lake has long been famous for its classic beauty and is considered a favorite tourist attraction. Lake Tai also supplies water to approximately 30 million people.

The cost of cleaning up of the lake alone is estimated at more than $14 billion. In addition to this expense, many Chinese citizens have been buying bottled water at a feverish pace as a result of Lake Tai’s repeated algal blooms. This increased demand for fresh drinking water has driven up the price of bottled water.

China’s algal bloom epidemic is not restricted to its rivers and lakes. China’s coastal shorelines are also suffering severely from a growing occurrence of red tides, an oceangoing version of eutrophication.

This problem is particularly relentless in the relatively shallow Yellow and Bohai Seas off northern China where Qingdao is located and where there is less tidal exchange. The red tides are rapidly destroying fish and devastating valuable marine life. China has seen an astonishing 40-fold increase in the incidence of red tides in the past few years.

The overall picture being painted by China’s pollution woes is one of a large country choking to death and drowning on a wide variety of deadly pollutants. Because of the country’s toxic environment, many Olympic athletes have chosen to train in adjacent countries, like Japan and South Korea, and will only fly into China for brief stopovers during their specific sporting events.

What that says about today’s China speaks volumes. This country’s need to deal with its very real pollution crisis is obvious and is emerging as one of the most far-reaching and irresponsible environmental disasters the world has ever seen.

Landslides caused by the Sichuan earthquake have blocked rivers and formed new, possibly unstable, lakes. Satellite images taken by the Taiwan’s National Space Organisation (NSPO) show one such lake forming in Beichuan County, one of the areas worst hit by the quake.

[via BBC]

Gary Works is an extensive steelmaking complex that sits on approximately 3,000 acres along the south shore of Lake Michigan just 15 miles southeast of Chicago. It is known as the number one polluter in the Lake Michigan basin and the third largest throughout all of the Great Lakes. In fact, U.S. Steel reported dumping more than 1.7 million pounds of pollution into the Grand Calumet in 2005, the last year for which figures are available.

Federal regulators sent Indiana environmental officials back to the drawing board to make sure Gary Works, U. S. Steel Corp’s largest manufacturing plant, reduces the amount of heavy metals and other toxic chemicals that flow directly into a Lake Michigan tributary. As it turns out, Gary Works is one of the largest polluters in the Great Lakes basin, which makes the company an extremely important environmental factor.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) blocked Gary Works’ proposal for a new water permit for its massive steel mill. This new permit would scrap, relax or omit the limits on the pollution that the U.S. Steel mill dumps into the Grand Calumet River. This is especially important because the Grand Calumet empties into Lake Michigan transmitting pollutants directly into the lake.

The EPA blocked the permit issued by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management in a letter dated October 1. The letter informed Indiana regulators that the EPA will not allow any new permit for Gary Works until significant pollution problems are remedied. As stated in the Clean Water Act, because the USEPA has authority over state environmental regulators, Indiana’s hands are tied.

The EPA’s letter rebuked the Indiana Department of Environmental Management for giving U.S. Steel five years to limit several extremely toxic and potentially deadly pollutants, including mercury, lead, cyanide, ammonia as well as a known cancer-causing chemical – benzo(a)pyrene.

The EPA also condemned Indiana for failing to impose more rigorous environmental pollution standards that would help clean up the Grand Calumet River. Hoosiers, especially those living around Lake Michigan or near the river itself, know that Grand Calumet is one of the most contaminated waterways in the Great Lakes region.

As written in federal law, states are required to renew water permits every five years in order to meet the Clean Water Act’s goal of limiting and eliminating pollution. However, Indiana has not reissued a water permit for U.S. Steel’s Gary Works since 1994.

Indiana officials now insist that this new proposed permit will do more to protect the environment than the old documents did. While officials are not answering many questions, they have promised that they will not finalize the permit until public concerns regarding Gary Works’ pollution problems are addressed.

In a document previously posted on the Internet, Indiana regulators stated they had removed some of the more stringent pollution limits from the old U.S. Steel permit because they did not believe the mill was that likely to exceed these limits in the future.

Environmental advocates, including the City of Chicago, dispute this logic. They say that having a lack of specific limits only clears the way for U.S. Steel to dump unlimited amounts of dangerous and potentially deadly pollutants, including oil and grease, lead, arsenic, benzene, fluoride and nitrates, directly into the water. This is the same water that will eventually end up in the drinking water system of countless people.

Critics of U.S. Steel’s Gary Works also remember that this mill has frequently has been cited for violating the Clean Water Act. Just one example – As part of a legal settlement with the EPA and United States Justice Department, U.S. Steel is attempting to dredge millions of cubic yards of highly contaminated sediment from the Grand Calumet River because of years of past environmental abuse and irresponsibility.

This latest fight involving a well-known Lake Michigan polluter comes just three months after Indiana regulators gave a BP refinery, in nearby Whiting, permission to significantly increase the amount of pollution it dumps into the lake. This is huge considering Lake Michigan is THE source of drinking water for Chicago and numerous other communities.

As a result of widespread public protest and even threats of legal action, BP later decided to step back and even promised to meet the more stringent pollution limits as stated in its old water permit.

U.S. STEEL Corp.
CHEMICALS RELEASED INTO the Grand Calumet/Lake Michigan – 2005
 

The Aral Sea is in the Republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. It is largely shallow with many lagoons and islands and was once the world’s fourth largest body of inland water. Today, it is the eighth largest, and one of our greatest ecological disasters.

In the 1960′s increasing amounts of water were diverted from the Aral Sea to the Amudarya and Syrdarya rivers for irrigation of rice and cotton crops. Over the years, the Aral Sea has retreated by as much as a hundred meters, leaving a vast area littered with abandoned fishing boats and other marine equipment.

Photo credit: upyernoz

Because the volume of water has shrunk so much, the salt in the water has risen to toxic levels, 23% in the late 1980′s. Once carp, bream, sturgeon, pike-perch and other fish provided a good living for commercial fishermen. Others made a living trapping muskrats. By 1982, all commercial fishing had ended and about 60,000 people lost their livelihoods.

With 500 species of birds, 100 species of fish and 200 species of mammals, the Aral Sea Basin had a diversity of wildlife that compared with Africa. Most of these animals have now died.

Every year the prevailing northeast wind carries over one hundred million tons of salt-laden, fertilizer- and pesticide-contaminated dust from the former sea. This dust has been found in Antarctic penguins. The same deadly mix has filtered into the ground water and into irrigation water.

Hospitalization rates have risen dramatically and the mortality rate has gone up by fifteen times in a ten year period. Local child mortality, due to the deterioration of the environment, is higher than anywhere else in the former Soviet Union.

The remnant of the Aral Sea has been divided by a dam. The North Aral Sea has seen an increase in water level due to many large international projects. The success there has given some hope for the South Aral Sea, which had been abandoned to its fate.

Most of us have heard stories of some unsuspecting child or fisherman happening upon a frog that seems completely healthy, except for the fact that it has no legs or an extra eye. At one time, these stories were deemed as oddities or unusual, freak occurrences. Now, however, malformed frogs are much more common than once thought and are real life indicators of significant problems in our environment.

It is true that some variations of morphological abnormalities are expected among the world’s vast amphibian population, including more than 4,000 species of frogs and toads. These anticipated abnormalities, however, are typically due to some type of trauma, developmental problems and mutations rather than environmental factors.

The United States is home to roughly 230 amphibian species, which includes 90 frog and toad species. Beginning in the early 90s, in several of Minnesota’s wetlands, malformation rates were found to be between 30 to 50%. With the typical, expected malformation rate between zero and two percent, this finding was cause for concern. Once Minnesota’s frog problems were unearthed, elevated malformation rates were discovered in 56 of the United States’ native species and in 48 states.

While these abnormalities are often referred to as “deformities,” most of the abnormalities found are actually “malformations.” Notably, there is a real difference between the two conditions. Deformation is the process of disfiguring or distorting an already existing body part while malformation is the process of disrupting a normally-formed body part or organ during those vital first stages of development.

The malformations most commonly reported by herpetologists involve missing legs, extra legs and paralyzed or misshapen legs. Also seen are frogs with legs that are fused against the frog’s body, webbed together with extra skin or split into two new legs halfway down.

Images of malformed frogs

Other malformations are also reported. Frogs with missing or extra eyes, as well as eyes that are unusual in size, shape and location have also been found. Misshapen jaws and incomplete tail absorption have also been documented.

Because frogs are extremely sensitive to their environments, they have long been considered the “canary in a coal mine” for environmental disasters. In the past, before better methods had been developed, coal miners commonly relied upon canaries to detect toxic or explosive gases in mines. These delicate birds are more sensitive to toxic gases than we are and would collapse long before any miners were affected. A collapsed canary made the perfect alarm for miners to get out immediately and for management to investigate the noxious problem and fix it.

As with the coalmining canaries, frogs are especially vulnerable to the environment in which they live. Frogs are especially sensitive to pollution and other environmental stressors. They live at the meeting place of two very different environments, the land and the water, and easily absorb damaging pollutants directly through their skin.

As human beings, we breathe through our lungs, which are obviously tucked safely inside our bodies. Our bodies provide much protection from direct contact with polluted air and contaminated water. Although some amphibians do breathe completely through their skin, the majority breathe and receive their oxygen partially through their skin, which is always open to the elements. Whether breathing partially or completely through their skin, the amphibian body is much more vulnerable and susceptible to outside factors, including diseases, toxic chemicals, ionizing radiation (UV-B) from the sun and habitat destruction.

Because of this special vulnerability, we continue to see an increasing numbers of malformed frogs along with a steadily decreasing population of frogs, and amphibians as a whole. Like the coalminers, this should be our alarm to look into and fix this problem. This complex problem, however, will not be easy to remedy because there are several possible contributing causes.

Photo Credit: Hamed Saber

Consider this. Amphibians are such effective indicators of significant environmental variations that many ecological problems may go undetected by our human eyes until significant environmental damage has occurred. The current worldwide amphibian population is declining and the number of bodily malformations is increasing. This may be an early warning to us – an early warning of serious ecosystem imbalances.

WHAT’S TO BLAME

First, consider the extensive use of pesticides across the United States. The chemical runoff collecting in the vast Midwestern farmlands is causing much damage to frog populations. Not only do excessive pesticides and other xenobiotic chemicals affect the sexual development of frogs, but it also makes them more susceptible to often fatal bacterial meningitis as well as some dangerous, parasitic fungi.

Scientists have confirmed that agricultural contaminants may be an important factor in amphibian declines in California. According to an article recently accepted by the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, a study by scientists of the U.S. Geological Survey and U.S. Department of Agriculture indicates that organophosphorus pesticides from agricultural areas, which are transported to the Sierra Nevada on prevailing summer winds, may be affecting populations of amphibians that breed in mountain ponds and streams.
USGS

Studies at the University of California Berkeley have been conducted on delicate developing tadpoles. The tadpoles were reared in a watery environment contaminated with a mixture of nine pesticides, fungicides and herbicides – chemicals commonly found in ponds located close to Midwestern cornfields.

The evidence showed that polluted tadpoles take longer to complete their metamorphosis into adult frogs. Because of this delay, they are smaller, which makes it harder for them to catch and eat their prey and turns them into easier prey for other animals. Research also showed that these frogs had increased levels of a stress hormone that causes holes to develop in the thymus gland, which likely causes an impaired immune response to disease.

Photo Credit: Stadtwald

Pesticides are just one factor causing the decline of amphibian populations. This problem is the result of a combination of factors. Excessive chemical applications, the introduction of nonnative predators and competitors, increasing levels of ultraviolet light and global warming, acid rain, mercury pollution, eradication of wetlands and overall habitat destruction are all contributing to the decline of the frog.

While it is a natural occurring process for amphibian populations to fluctuate according to environmental conditions, such as rainfall amounts, the human population is the most likely component to the amphibian malformation and population decline.

Humans have the capability to improve or correct environmental problems. We also possess the ability to exacerbate the same ecological problems at local, regional and global levels. It’s up to us!