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Gastric-Brooding Frog

It was a PBS program that alerted me to the extinction of a frog called the gastric-brooding frog. These animals reproduce by the female swallowing the fertilized eggs and keeping them in her stomach until the young emerge as fully formed frogs. The young fertilized eggs/tadpoles secrete an unidentified substance that stops acid production in the female’s stomach and shuts down her entire digestive system, converting it from a means of sustenance into a brood pouch. After the appropriate developmental period, lasting from 36-43 days, the little frogs, about 21 to 26 of them, come out of their mother’s mouth as fully formed and ready for action (see image). The delivery process apparently takes place in the water. Two different species of these frogs were known as the Southern and Northern gastric-brooding frogs, indigenous to Queensland Australia.  Now it appears that both species are extinct. They have not been seen in the wild since the 1980s and attempts to maintain them in captivity were not successful. Like most disappearing amphibians, the cause of this extinction is unknown, but the three leading hypotheses include global climate change, fungus infections and habitat destruction, all three of which can be related to human activity, including an increasingly understood global threat to amphibians from a fungus infection.

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A recent paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, but summarized in The Guardian,  grapples with some of the ideas floating around related to global warming. The hottest year on record was 1998 and because it has been more than a decade since then, with somewhat cooler temperatures prevailing, opponents of global climate change have argued that the forces for drastic change have been over-rated. Some even want to argue that the planet is cooling, not warming. In the new article, the authors point out that we have enjoyed a period of comparatively low temperatures because sun spot activity, which showers us with additional photons, has been in its eleven year quiet cycle. But during that eleven year pause, carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere have increased more than previous projections anticipated, so the resumption of sun spot activity is likely to usher in new forces for increased global temperatures, such that we could erase the 1998 record. This paper attempts to deal with several forces at work, not all of them man made. However, arguments are presented that El Nino, an event where the Pacific Ocean warms because of a collapse of the normal easterly trade winds off the coast of Ecuador, used to be on a ten to 11 year cycle, but in more modern times, that cycle has been reduced to four years. The basic argument offered by this new research, suggests that, with the resumption of sun spot activity, we will see a new wave of heat and weather induced destruction around the globe in the next few years. As the quality of our atmospheric air improves, with additional removal of ash and soot pollution (some of which comes from dirty Chinese pollution sources), we will see further intensification of global temperatures because these pollutants are blocking out some of the sun, like a mild pair of sunglasses.

If you want to get a nice graphical explanation of the forces behind the El Nino southern oscillation weather pattern that impacts on our own weather and has global influences, with alternate warm (hot) and cool weather cycling, The Guardian has a nice, comprehensible visual explaining the essence of El Nino. Many of the global warming or cooling projections (such as Europe’s winters getting colder) are based on modeling results which give altered trade wind patterns due to polar warming conditions and these polar changes seem to be happening on a much faster scale, indicating that our models are too simple to give us good insight into what’s going on. We need much better, more sophisticated models and maybe by the time we get them, our future will have arrived.

RFM

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While the new swine flu epidemic is causing an appropriate level of alarm, more subtle aspects of environmental failure are beginning to surface, that, in the long run, will pose a more serious problem to our food supply and very likely escalate the cost of food. Europe is far more advanced than the United States in regulating the chemical industry and several herbicides that are toxic, such as Atrazine, have been banned from use in Europe, but are still used  widely in the United States. It’s ironic that the research showing Atrazine’s toxicity (it gets in the ground water and causes feminization of male frogs–if it does that to frogs what does it do to our own reproductive functions?) was done here in the United States. But, under the Bush administration, the EPA approved the use of Atrazine for United States agriculture.
As I was scanning the paper this morning, mostly focusing on reports about swine flu, I came across a more obscure but troubling article. A report in the New York Times today points out that Europe, like the United States, has a major bee problem. The currently high level of bee mortality in Europe could permanently wipe out bees in that region within 8-10 years, according to Apimondia, an international bee organization. Last year alone about 30%, or more than 13 million of Europe’s bee hives died out. The loss of bee hives was much higher in some regions, reaching 80% in southwest Germany. This problem is potentially far more serious than swine flu, since about 35% of Europe’s food supply depends on pollination and no one pollinates as effectively as bees.
We have already heard about the bee crisis in the United States where mobile bee hives have been used for farm pollination for many years. In this brave new world of our farm economy, farmers pay for massive numbers of bees brought to their farms in trucks, where they are released, sting a few people, and then serve as pollinators for the region for a set period of time before the bee keeper moves on to his next contract.  The near complete absence of local bees makes this arrangement a necessity. No magic bullet seems to explain the mounting decline of bee hives, either in Europe or the United States.  The cumulative effects of mite infestation, pesticides and herbicides have been blamed for this crisis, but no simple solution or cure is available. The bees leave the hives to forage and pollinate, but they don’t come back. A colleague of mine working on the problem of bee vitality  here at the University of Minnesota has concluded that the bees are simply stressed by too many excesses and over stimulation from their environment. One popular idea is that the stimulation by the chemical environment leads them to spend too much energy reliably identifying their to and from path and this stress leads to infestation with mites and an early death. But, stress is one thing, early death is another.

It is alarming to see that Europe is suffering from the same problem that we have here in the United States, since they have been better about regulating their chemical industry. Indeed representatives from Europe have appeared in this country giving lectures to major manufacturing establishments to tell them what chemicals they can and cannot use if they expect to export their products to Europe. And, they are all taking careful notes, because they can’t lobby their way into avoidance, like they do here. Fortunately for us, we are still enjoying benefits of a free market economy approach to the chemical industry–if it doesn’t smell too bad, go ahead and use it. I suppose what we need are large numbers of robotic bee colonies that only have to come back to their hives to get their little lithium batteries recharged.  Would a robotic bee project be a suitable challenge for the summer students at MIT? Or, should we take a stab at a biological approach? Where is the genome of the  honey bee when you need it most?

RFM

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