Are frogs turning gay

It's quite another to say that a person's sexual orientation could be shaped, in part, by their environmental exposures. It would be arrested - meaning that your urethral opening would be lower down in the penile shaft, the penis normally as it develops is curved and it straightens out so in Hypospadias it wouldn’t have straightened out and the foreskin would only have formed on the top of the penis, wouldn’t be able to come down to the bottom because that lock or that hormone receptor would be blocked or disrupted by the environmental toxin.

AHEARN: Ok, so if Tyrone Hayes is finding feminizing effects in frogs who are exposed to atrazine – one of these environmental toxins that Baskin is talking about – are there some parallels to be drawn in human beings?

“We have animals that are females, in the sense that they behave like females: They have estrogen, lay eggs, they mate with other males.

But on the inside it had large testis, so these are testis, and this is an oviduct. We can certainly look at populational [sic] models and say this looks like it’s pretty closely related, we probably should take some actions here to see if it is, but we can’t say that we know the whole story yet.

AHEARN: Devore says there's a whole lot more to someone's sexual orientation than the chemicals they may have been exposed to during development.

DEVORE: This isn’t just about where you stick your things.

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. Male frogs have two identical sex chromosomes (ZZ) while females have both a Z and a W – the opposite of XX female and XY male humans.

It wasn’t until college that Devore came to terms with his condition and decided to devote himself to helping others born with Hypospadias. At the start of his career, environmental scientist Max Lambert wanted to be part of this effort. 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.

Done!

AHEARN: He gets a spoon to mush the melted chocolate chips around, and comes back out to sit with his mom and me at the kitchen table.

ALICE: I mean, I talk to him about it personally. They’re in our toys, the children’s toys. Dr. Tiger Howard Devore is a sex therapist and clinical psychologist in New York City.

DEVORE: Isn’t it great that some doctor can tell you what’s normal?

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. But also about the many, many other animals who don’t live quite the way we might expect.

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Ambika Kamath is trained as a behavioral ecologist and evolutionary biologist.

What he found was entirely unexpected. Working with the African clawed frog, Hayes and his colleagues showed in 2002 that tadpoles raised in atrazine-contaminated water become hermaphrodites – they develop both female (ovaries) and male (testes) gonads. The cosmetics. 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.

If you go to your kitchen sink and under your bathroom sink and look at the cleaning compounds that are there.