Gender Benders Feminize Fish. Who's Next?
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 06.15.07
Canada has a lotta lakes; so many that they can afford to take a few and do some destructive testing -"Entire small lakes are available to test hypotheses about freshwater ecosystems"-)(::Experimental Lakes) In one of them, Karen Kidd of the University of New Brunswick tossed in a heap of birth control pills (well, more accurately, she seeded a 34-hectare lake with 5 ppt 17∝-ethynylestradiol—the active ingredient in birth control pills) to see what would happen. (This is a big issue for TreeHuggers- we talk often about gender bender chemicals getting into our water and 85% of the hormones in birth control pills goes through the body and down the toilet. At the same time we say don't drink bottled water, drink tap. For cities with "closed loop" systems like those on the Great Lakes, we are, as Jacob so aptly put it, spiking the punch.)
She studied the effect of the hormones on the wonderfully named fathead minnow. According to Environmental Science and Technology:
"Within weeks of the first doses, male minnows started making vitellogenin, an egg-yolk protein typically produced by female fish. Within 2 years, the protein concentration reached up to 10,000 times normal levels. The exposure delayed sexual development of both sexes and because minnows spawn for just one season during their 2-year life, this caused the population to plummet toward collapse in just 3 years. The minnow population took 2 years to recover after researchers stopped adding estrogen.".::ES&T and ::JS Online
My wife and I have been using a modified Billings method throughout our married life with great success. The downside: a bit more carefulness and abstentia during ovulation. The upside: no messy barriers, cremes, foams, steroids, or chemicals.
The use of natural family planning is typically seen as a Catholic issue, and for this reason I can imagine this post might be dismissed out of hand. However, a case could easily be made that such methods are quintessentially green: when applied consistently they work very well, they have no impact to the environment, it requires couples to think responsibly about their actions, and make small sacrifices in order to have a positive effect on the world.
I use a hormone-free IUD. It is safe, effective and cheap. Mine lasts 7 years.
I'm not an ecologist or a biologist (I'm in fact a microbiologist).... so I'm not well versed in the tools and type of testing that is commonly used by/available for these fields of study. But I have a hard time swallowing the idea that we are polluting lakes on purpose with chemicals. It's not even so much the idea that the lake itself is being polluted but rather that these lakes are a part of a natural ecosystem (and not within a self-contained environment) that could release its chemicals into a surroundings, either by predation of the aquatic life by birds and animals not restricted to the boundaries of the lake, by leaking of lakewater into groundwater, or by the natural drainage of the lake itself.
A better website on the Experimental Lakes Area is here: http://www.umanitoba.ca/institutes/fisheries/index.html