To Save Ourselves
Consider frogs. They've been around for 350 million years, and that's a
while. They are essentially funnels with a big mouth at one end, and at
the other, big legs to escape predators with. They've evolved ingenious
techniques for surviving serious cold and heat and drought. They seem
well adapted to anything nature wants to throw at them. And so it is.
They've survived astronomical catastrophes, drifting and colliding
continents, glaciations, and mass extinctions of all sorts. Everything
except us, possibly. It is a fact that frog populations are in decline
everywhere, even in pristine environments where we haven't yet pulled
our ugliest stunts.
But on August 8, 1995, the frogs' saga took a nasty turn. A group of
middle school children visiting an environmental learning center in Le
Sueur County, Minnesota, found an entire population of leopard frogs
suffering from all kinds of horrid deformities. Extra legs, extra
arms. More limbs than a centipede. Only one eye. Open the mouth and
there's the other one. A hell-hole of frog horrors. The Minnesota
Pollution Control Agency was called into to view the spectacle, and
soon the scientific community was in a hubbub. In A Plague of
Frogs, William Souder, who covered Minnesota's deformed frogs for
the Washington Post, reviews that scientific hubbub following
the discovery in Le Sueur County.
It took awhile to dig out, but the literature is there. It just took a
French Canadian to make it available to language deprived American
scientists. Deformed frogs have not been all that uncommon. Frog
deformation does happened quite naturally. But the literature also
demonstrated that what was going on in Le Sueur County was of entirely
new order of magnitude. And once the news got on the Internet, deformed
frogs, soon found all over Minnesota, started popping up in other
places as well. Canada. Vermont. Japan. California. Oregon.
Two hypotheses immediately presented themselves. The first was that the
frogs were being exposed to some type of deforming pollutant. Simple,
find it and get rid of it. Not so simple. In Minnesota, 15 types of
pesticide are applied three times a year in addition to several
fungicides and insecticides. These breakdown into.what? Nobody knows.
Which of the chemicals or its 'daughters' was the guilty party.
Possibly it was two or three of them in combination, and anyway, how
and when were they delivered? In the water? In the sediments? In the
vegetation?
The second hypothesis was that it was a parasite causing the
deformities. Some are known to do that. But why would a parasite so
thoroughly massacre its host population? And why now, if not a hundred
years ago?
Possibly the answer lies in a synergistic combination of toxicants and
parasites. Possibly it is neither, but global warming or increased UV
radiation, or those in combination with toxicants and parasites. Or
possibly frogs are just at the end of their evolutionary rope, and
there's no help for it.
With all the possibilities, designing data collection techniques and
laboratory experiments became a scientific nightmare all its own. Key
components of field observations weren't gathered and laboratory
findings just didn't jive with field observations. Yes, this toxicant
will cause deformities in the lab but in the field the toxicant just
isn't present. Oh, well, time to whip the slate clean and start over.
Let's hypothesize that...and here we go again.
To make a long story short, we don't know much more about frog
deformities than we knew on August 8, 1995. But in telling the tale,
Souder tells us a lot about how science, good and bad, is done by big
and small bureaucracies and by individual scientists. He takes the
reader with ease and daring through a lot of complex ideas from
evolution, from embryology, from toxicology. And he explores a lot of
interesting personalities from middle school teachers, to landowners
worried about being blamed for things they don't understand, to simple
and contented professors in backwater colleges, to science's most
arrogant and smug geniuses.
Much of this is very troublesome. Biologists who are concerned with
organisms are themselves an endangered species being replaced by
molecular biologists in their laboratories and by biology teachers
preparing students for medical schools and owning BMWs. We just don't
have the scientist who can tackle a major field problem concerning
basic organisms, living critters. Agencies squabble and fight among
themselves and can't protect their incomplete data from an incompetent
public. Landowners are too frightened to cooperate. Professors withhold
data and findings the public has paid for in hopes of achieving more
prestigious publication, and thereby faster promotion and tenure. And
finally, and most disturbing, we may know a lot, but we don't know
diddle-squat about how life on this plant works. We've a lot of
equipment for measuring this and that, and a lot of theories and ideas,
but not the organization or management to tackle any major
environmental or ecological problem. The frogs are trying to tell us
something, but something too complicated for us to understand.
But, if you aren't into frogs, what do you care? The answer, beyond
our simple lack of preparation for understanding what is going on among
the frogs, is that frogs are supposed to be a 'sentinel species',
itself a controversial concept in science. Frogs are major predators
who eat, in their specific habitat, pretty far up on the food chain.
If the frogs of the world are doing well, we have little reason to
worry. If the frogs are doing badly, we have reason to be anxious. The
frogs aren't doing well so we should be worried. As one of Souder's
scientists is made to observe, 'We don't have to save the world. We
have to save ourselves.'
— 19 March 2003
