Unraveling an Environmental Mystery
by William Souder
University of Minnesota Press
December 2002, 320 pages, $17.95 (US)
Review by Wesley Burnett
PopMatters Books Critic
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.'
