At FROGS ARE GREEN, we have been concerned for some time about the weedkiller, Roundup, manufactured by Mosanto, because of studies that have shown birth defects and reproductive deformities occurring in animals, including frogs, after exposure to its active ingredient, the chemical glyphosate. A new review of scientific reports about Roundup by the organization Open Source Earth suggests that that glyphosate may cause birth defects in humans as well.
If you drive to your local Wal-Mart or Home Depot, you might see huge canisters of the weedkiller outside the store for lawn and garden use. Roundup is one of the most common weedkillers in the U.S., used for agricultural as well as non-agricultural uses.
Soybean field, courtesy USDA
Yet there have been increasing concerns about the safety of the herbicide for years. One study, for example, conducted by Argentine government scientist, Andres Carrasco, published in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology in 2010, found that glyphosate causes malformations in frog and chicken embryos at doses far lower than those used in agricultural spraying. The study also noted these malformations were similar to human birth defects found in genetically modified soy-producing regions. Carrasco suspected that the toxicity classification of glyphosate was too low and that in some cases, this chemical could be a powerful poison.
How has glyphosate been regulated in the U.S.? Not very stringently it seems. According to the Huffpo article, regulators in the United States have said they are aware of the concerns surrounding glyphosate. The Environmental Protection Agency, which is required to reassess the safety and effectiveness of all pesticides on a 15-year cycle through a process called registration review, is currently examining the compound.
According to a statement given to the Huffington Post, the EPA initiated a registration review of glyphosate in July 2009. It will determine if their previous assessments of this chemical need to be revised based on the results of this review. It issued a notice to the company Monsanto to submit human health and ecotoxicity data in September 2010.
The EPA said it will also review information and data from other independent researchers, including Earth Open Source.
This sounds like a pretty flabby response to a serious issue. Imagine if in the early 1960s the response to the threats of DDT was so wishy-washy? We hope the EPA takes a much closer look at the most widely used weedkiller in the U.S.
Each spring at Frogs Are Green, we try to encourage people to create backyards (or gardens, if you’re English) that are friendly to wildlife and the environment, water-wise, and easy to maintain without using herbicides and pesticides.
Imitate Nature
It is possible to create a wildlife friendly garden without using pesticides and herbicides, but you’ll need to mimic nature a bit and do some detective work to find out what types of plants and flowers flourish in your area. Sometimes you don’t even need to plant these natives—they may migrate to your backyard, and if you like them, you can find a place for them. This happened with me—a native fern migrated over to my yard and it is quite beautiful. Over the years, the ferns have spread and make a nice ground cover. That doesn’t mean you need to restrict yourself to native plants. My New Guinea impatiens obviously are not native to New Jersey, but I definitely try to fit in a number of low-maintenance native plants.
In my first years of gardening, I had to water my backyard every day with a hose to keep it alive. Now with a backyard filled with lots of native plants, I only water the potted plants.
Survival of the Fittest
After several years, I’ve realized that I can’t plant hostas—they’re like candy to slugs. Rather than spend money and effort, and possibly introduce toxins to the soil, to get rid of the slugs, I now keep the hostas in pots, above the ground, and then periodically lift the pots to check for any slugs. (Yes, I tried the tuna can full of beer method to get rid of slugs, but they didn’t fall for that trick.)
Since I don’t have much sun in my urban backyard, I don’t plant sun-loving annuals anymore. These flowers didn’t flourish and so seemed to attract disease and bugs. Have you tried some flowers that didn’t quite make it, or if they did, required a lot of watering or pesticides to maintain them? You may have found that other plants just seem to do great year after year without much attention. In my garden, potted geraniums seem to do well, lasting all the way through until frost, even without a lot of sun or attention. Even though they’re not the most exotic flowers, I have lots of them in interesting colors.
KEEP THE ANIMALS HAPPY
I put out seed for the birds, although around this time of year in late spring, I start to cut down on bird seed. I put out water for them in a bird bath as well, and I sometimes also notice bees dipping into the bird bath. Because I don’t use herbicides or pesticides, I am not unintentionally killing off good insects—bees, lady bugs, etc. or potentially harming other animals like songbirds.
Build a Frog Pond
We don’t have any amphibians in my city (that I know of), but if you have amphibians in your area, put out a toad abode to keep these local insect-eating amphibians happy.
It’s also possible to create a frog pond relatively easily without a huge expense or effort. My sister put in a frog pond by her house in Connecticut, and on one summer day, she counted eighteen frogs enjoying her pond, including one frog who jumped up and sat right beside her on the garden bench. Here’s how she did it:
She dug out a base that was 4 feet by 7 feet, about 2 feet deep. On each corner, she created a shelf, 1 foot deep, for aquatic plants.
She bought pond liner from a garden center, a piece larger than the pond (so it was 12 feet long by 9 feet wide) and put stones down to hold it in place. She also piled smaller stones in one corner that came just above the water as a ramp for the frogs to get in and out of the pond.
She also added water flowers with leaves and lily pads. These plants act as filters for the pond (and, of course, our froggy friends like to sit on them).
She put in a pump to circulate the water (with an outdoor extension cord buried in ground to house).
She notes that the pond should be cleaned out every year. Take out the water, but be careful if there are frogs eggs in the pond. Put the eggs in a clean bowl with pond water before putting back in the pond. Also, she did not add the frogs to the pond—they migrated to her pond from another small pond on her property. Don’t introduce non-native frogs to your pond as they could disrupt the local ecology and introduce disease to native frogs
Please send us your ideas for creating a natural backyard and if you have some pictures, send them along and we’ll add them to our backyard gallery (see the photo gallery in our sidebar to the right).
Here is more information about your having your backyard certified as a Wildlife Habitat by the National Wildlife Federation.
One of our first posts at Frogs Are Green was about the coqui, a frog native to Puerto Rico, where it exists alongside several other species of Eleutherodactylus frogs and where a biological balance is maintained. It was introduced to Hawaii in the mid- to late 1990s and has no competitors so it has spread unchecked and is considered an invasive species. But our guest author, Sydney Ross Singer, a medical anthropologist, biologist, and author living on the Big Island of Hawaii, would like us to look at this problem from a new perspective. Perhaps this “alien” species should not be rejected and destroyed but welcomed.
Besides being beautiful, fascinating, a source of medicinal substances, and essential for healthy ecosystem function, frogs are canaries in the environmental coal mine. They are sensitive to pollution and climate change. And their numbers are declining at extinction rates.
That’s bad news for the rest of us living in the coal mine. Clearly, we need to change our ways.
But change is difficult for a culture to accept. Until people are dying at the rate of frogs, nothing will alter our bad cultural behaviors.
So the next best thing to do is try saving the frogs. We may not be able to stop pesticide and herbicide use, or end the deforestation and development of wild areas, or stop all the industries and lifestyles that contribute to climate change. But we can catch frogs where they are declining and find new, healthier places for them to live.
We might not have the political and economic clout to stop multinational corporations from exploiting and altering the world’s environments. But we can help refugee species flee the destruction and avoid extinction.
There are places on the planet that can serve as sanctuaries for these refugees. One place, in particular, stands out as one of the best – Hawaii.
If you move frogs from one place to another that already has frogs, the immigrants will compete with the natives, and you can possibly lose native frog populations. Hawaii, however, has no native frogs, or any native reptiles, amphibians, land snakes, or lizards. What better place to introduce frogs? Lots of insect pests to eat, warm and humid conditions, and few predators. If we wanted a sanctuary for endangered and threatened frogs, this is the place.
But wait. Can we just move a species from one part of the planet to another? Won’t it become invasive and cause damage?
It is this question that is keeping frogs from finding new homes. According to current trends in environmental thinking, species “belong” where they are “native.” You’re not supposed to move them to places where they “don’t belong.” When it comes to frogs, the Hawaii government has said they clearly “don’t belong.”
Of course, there are already frogs and toads in Hawaii, which were brought by environmental managers for insect control decades ago. Back then species were introduced deliberately to enhance biodiversity and provide needed environmental services, such as pest control, or to serve as a food source. The environment was seen as a garden for us to plant and inhabit as we saw fit.
That has all changed. Now the goal of managers is to kill introduced species in order to preserve and restore native ecosystems as they had existed prior to western contact centuries ago. They won’t get rid of the people, or the agriculture, or the chemical spraying, or the bulldozing, or the deforestation, or the development, or the intercontinental shipping, or the industries and energy policies that help cause climate change. It’s hard to change these aspects of the culture. But you sure can kill things that “don’t belong.”
What was called “exotic” or “immigrant” is now called “alien” or “invasive.” We have gone from an open immigration policy to a bio-xenophobia.
When coqui tree frogs accidentally arrived in Hawaii with shipments of plants from Florida or Puerto Rico, the response was ballistic. The mayor of Hawaii declared a state of emergency. Scientists feared the sky was falling, and that the coquis, which eat lots of insects, would decimate the insect population to the point of starving all other insectivorous creatures. The sound of the frogs, a two-toned “ko-KEE”, was described as a “shrill shriek” guaranteed to keep everyone awake at night, run down property values, and drive away tourists.
Ironically, this same coqui frog is the national animal of Puerto Rico, its native land. In fact, Puerto Ricans love this frog and its chirping sound so much that it is honored in local folklore. People describe the nighttime sound of the coqui as soothing and necessary for sleep, and Puerto Rican travelers often bring recordings of coquis with them when away from home to help them sleep.
Puerto Rico has numerous species of coqui frogs, many of which are now extinct or threatened. Unfortunately, frog numbers are declining because of fungal infections, development, climate change, and pesticide and herbicide use. So you can imagine how angry and upset Puerto Ricans were when Hawaii announced its Frog War to eradicate the newly arrived coquis.
Over the past 10 years, millions of dollars have been spent in Hawaii trying to kill coquis. And despite wide cost-saving cuts in government spending, there is still money to kill coquis.
At first, they tried an experiment to kill coquis with concentrated caffeine, giving the frogs a heart attack. A special emergency exemption was needed from the EPA to allow this spraying of caffeine into the environment. It’s impact on humans, pets, plants, lizards, and other non-target species was unknown, or what it would do once it entered the groundwater and flowed to the oceans. Chemical warfare suits were needed by applicators to prevent exposure to the highly dangerous caffeine, which was at concentrations 100 times that of coffee. There is no antidote for caffeine poisoning.
When the caffeine experiment proved untenable and too dangerous, citric acid was encouraged as a frogicide. Sprayers soaked the forests with acid, sometimes sprayed from helicopters, to drench the tiny frogs and burn them to death. Of course, this also killed plants and other critters, such as lizards. But since lizards are non-native, nobody in the government cared.
But citric acid is expensive. So another experiment was tried, using hydrated lime to burn the frogs. This caustic chemical can also cause irreversible eye and lung damage to people and pets on contact, so another emergency exemption was needed from the EPA to experiment with it. As it turned out, the hydrated lime didn’t work very well, and it killed lots of plants.
So the University of Hawaii experimented on developing a frog disease to unleash on the frogs. They tried a fungus to infect the frogs, the same one killing frogs elsewhere in the world. They realized the fungus might also kill the geckos, skinks, anoles, and other lizards, as well as the toads. But since none are native to Hawaii, none of the eradicators cared. In fact, destroying all the lizards and toads would be considered a plus. The coqui frogs, however, survived the fungus, so it was never released wide scale.
By now you may wonder how people can get away with this abuse of frogs. Aren’t there laws protecting animals from this type of cruelty?
There are. So to get around the laws the Hawaii legislature passed a law defining the coqui as a “pest.” Pest species are exempted from humane laws.
This moral depravity reached its zenith in 2007, with a planned Coqui Bounty Hunter contest to be held by public schools on the Big Island. Schools instructed students to kill coquis, either by burning them with acid, cooking them alive, or freezing them. The school with the most “kills” would receive a prize — the violent video games Playstation 3 and Xbox. The contest was canceled once it was pointed out to the schools that students are supposed to receive humane, not inhumane, education.
Despite the eradication attempts, the frogs spread. Actually, sometimes they spread because of these attempts, since coquis try leaving areas disturbed by spraying. An interisland quarantine on the coqui still exists, requiring all plant nurseries to treat plants with hot water, proven lethal to coquis and their eggs, prior to transport to other islands. But the coquis seem to frequently survive that, too.
So here is the irony. Frogs are disappearing from everywhere in the world except in Hawaii, where the government is trying to make them disappear.
Yet, despite the endless anti-coqui propaganda, people are coming to like the little coqui frog, especially those people who have arrived to Hawaii since the advent of the coqui. To these people, the sound of Hawaii includes the coqui. To these new human immigrants, the coqui is normal, and enjoyable. They understand why the Puerto Ricans love these frogs.
If we are to save the world’s endangered and threatened frogs, and other wildlife that needs rescue from the human-damaged world, we need to change our environmental immigration policy. It doesn’t matter where a species is native, or where it “belongs”. That these species survive is what matters. And this may require finding them a new home.
This is not to suggest that we bring in species willy nilly, without thinking about the impact on local species. We need careful study to know which species can be introduced, and where. But unless we open our borders, and our hearts, to these refugee species, they will die.
We caused their problems. Their fate is in our hands.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sydney Ross Singer is a medical anthropologist, biologist, and author living on the Big Island of Hawaii. He is an outspoken defender of the Hawaiian coqui frog, has created Hawaii’s first coqui frog sanctuary, and has been featured on Animal Planet, PBS Nature, BBC radio, and Univision. He is co-author of Panic in Paradise: Invasive Species, Hysteria, and the Hawaiian Coqui Frog War (ISCD Press, 2005). His website is www.HawaiianCoqui.org.
If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man. —Albert Einstein*
Courtesy of Maine Department of Agriculture
Did you know that honey bees are vanishing worldwide? Like frogs, they are being decimated by disease. While frogs are dying because of a fungus, bees are dying from a fungus combined with a virus.
Bees are responsible for pollinating 90 percent of the world’s commercial plants, from fruits and vegetables to coffee and cotton. Over the past few years, more than one in three honey bee colonies has died nationwide, posing a serious risk to our natural food supply in a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). When a hive experiences CCD, the honey bees desert their hive and die. CCD symptoms have been recorded in over 35 states across the U.S. and in many other countries worldwide.
Why are Bees so Vulnerable to Disease?
Some of the possible causes for weakening the bees’ immune systems, include pesticides, inbreeding, monoculture (planting one crop only), and the possible effects of genetically-modified crops.
To learn more about this problem, you might want to check out a new documentary called Vanishing of the Bees that is coming out this month, narrated by actor Ellen Page. The film is being screened in selected towns and cities nationwide. Here is a link to Bill Maher’s recent interview with Ellen Page.
And to help the bees, you might want to consider planting bee-friendly flowers or putting a bee house in your garden, and limiting your use of pesticides and herbicides. Buy organic honey from local bee keepers, or even consider becoming a beekeeper yourself. Please see the Honey Bee Conservancy for more ideas about how you can help bees.
The parallel between the plight of the frogs and the plight of the bees has an eerie similarity, although the specific issues involved are quite different. While scientists might have some clues about what is killing the bees and frogs, the underlying cause for why they are so are vulnerable to disease is still unknown. As one commenter on a NY Times blog wrote,“People should be aware of how fragile are the links in the eco-system, how interdependent all life is, and how simple, small things can quickly create major threats to all we take for granted.”
*As quoted by Bill Maher in his interview with Ellen Page
A few weeks ago, we wrote a post about the unusual mass die-offs of animals that have been occurring since the beginning of this year. While writing this post, we had to wade through a lot of strange stories to try and get to the truth, including a few conspiracy stories about how Vladimir Putin might be involved, and so on.
So when I saw a story with the headline, Bye Bye Blackbird: USDA Acknowledges a Hand in One Mass Bird Death, I didn’t take it too seriously. Yet this story, a repost of a Christian Science Monitor article on the Truthout website, turns out to be true. Evidently the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has taken responsibility for the death of hundreds of starlings, found frozen on the ground and in the trees in a park in Yankton, South Dakota, in late January. A farmer contracted the government to poison the starlings, that were causing problems in a cattle feedlot, eating the feed and leaving waste on both the feed and equipment.
It turns out that the USDA has been providing this service to farmers since the 1960s, in a program called Bye Bye Blackbird, using an avicide called DCR-1339 to kill the birds. In 2009 alone, according to the Christian Science Monitor article, USDA agents have euthanized more than 4 million red-winged blackbirds, starlings, cowbirds, and grackles. In addition to the USDA program,
…a so-called depredation order from the US Fish and Wildlife Service allows blackbirds, grackles, and starlings to be killed by anyone who says they pose health risks or cause economic damage. Though a permit is needed in some instances, the order is largely intended to cut through red tape for farmers, who often employ private contractors to kill the birds and do not need to report their bird culls to any authority.
I’m sure these birds are pests to farmers, and might pose a health risk if they gather near feedlots, but it seems like such an extreme measure to poison the birds, possibly introducing yet more toxins into the environment that might harm other local wildlife. I wasn’t able to find out much about DCR-1339, the chemical used, except that it has a “low toxicity” risk to other animals. That is has any toxicity risk at all to wildlife should concern people.
Animal Control—Without Poison
Are there other ways to protect the grain without killing the birds? I checked a Canadian pest control website, which offered lots of solutions to bird control, none of which involved poison. Here are just a few:
Netting
Netting is an excellent method of reducing bird roosting, nesting and feeding, which is not subject to bird acclimation (i.e. they can’t “get used to it”). It is economically feasible over life of netting; neighbors prefer it to other bird scaring methods.
Sound devices
Propane cannons, whistling or pyrotechnic pistols, predator mimicking sound generators can be effective for dispersing birds.
Visual scare devices
Streamers, flashtape, and scare-eye balloons are some of the devices that can be effective on some species and are cheap and relatively easy to install.
Flashing lights and mirrors
These are effective against starlings; solar powered units are available that require little maintenance besides frequent moving around.
Falconry
This is an effective control if there is sustained activity in a large area. Birds of prey are not pets and require significant investment in time and training for falconers. If hiring a service, a long-term commitment is necessary and can be expensive.
I found it interesting that this Canadian website included the following warning:
It is illegal to use poison and adhesives to kill, injure, or capture wildlife.
The U.S. government’s Bye Bye Blackbird poison program is a relic of another, less environmentally-friendly time. We hope the government will consider other, greener ways to help farmers deal with the bird problem.
The life of a sea turtle hatchling isn’t easy. After they hatch out of leathery eggs in a nest, buried deep in the sand, they move immediately toward the light above the ocean, scramble into the surf, and swim for a couple of days straight without stopping. Finally they rest in floating seaweed called sargassum. Sea turtle babies float along in the sargassum, a mini-ecosystem that provides food and protection, for a few years until they grow from about the size of a cookie to the size of a dinner plate.
This year, however, wasn’t a normal year for the sea turtle hatchlings. Because of the 4.9 millions of barrels of oil spewed into the Gulf as a result of the BP oil spill, the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, those seaweed life rafts were covered in oil or were incinerated during the many controlled burns. Under these conditions, most of these sea turtle hatchlings wouldn’t have survived. Wildlife officials decided to intervene and transport the latest generation of sea turtle babies to a cleaner part of the ocean.
On October 1, the New York Times ran an article, The BP-Spill Baby-Turtle Brigade by Jon Mooallem that tells the inspiring, though bittersweet, story of the extraordinary efforts of the volunteers who helped save the hatchlings. For years, volunteers with the Alabama organization, Share the Beach, have taken time out of their lives each year to help protect threatened and endangered sea turtles along the Alabama coast. During the nesting season, they clear the beach of debris so turtles can lay their eggs; they patrol the beaches and protect the nests after the female turtle lays her eggs; and they give the hatchlings a head start by helping them reach the ocean.
Because of their experience , the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asked these volunteers to help dig up the nests during the last days of the eggs’ incubation. They then packed the eggs in Styrofoam containers, and the eggs were transported by FedEx trucks to a climate-controlled warehouse at the Kennedy Space Center on the east coast of Florida. After hatching, the baby turtles were released into the oil-free Atlantic.
But it wasn’t easy for the volunteers to let their babies go. As quoted in the NY Times article, a Share the Beach team leader named Bill Hanks said, “It’s kind of like it’s our turtles. You get attached to them, almost like a mama-daddy thing.”
Sending the eggs was especially difficult because a mature female sea turtle will usually return to the beach where she hatched to lay her own eggs. Because sea turtles’ nesting and hatching was disrupted and they entered the ocean from another beach, the question is, will these turtles eventually return to Gulf Coast beaches or to Florida beaches?
Kemp's ridley sea turtle hatchlings from the Gulf Coast released into the Atlantic Ocean from the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, Florida. Photo by Kim Shiflett, NASA.
But the volunteers, though devastated, knew they had to do it for the sake of the turtles. (Incidentally not all scientists are in favor of this type of hands-on intervention with sea turtles, but most seemed to agree it was acceptable in such an extraordinary crisis.)
In late August the operation wound down as the sargassum seemed to recover. Although the surface of the Gulf appears to be oil-free, it remains to be seen what has happened to all that oil and chemical dispersant. Those sea turtles that depend on food deeper down in the ocean may suffer. For example, the main diet of leatherback turtles is jellyfish. Have jellyfish absorbed oil and disperant chemicals, and thus will now be ingested by the critically endangered leatherbacks? It seems likely.
While things look bleak for leatherbacks and other marine animals in the Gulf, at least some of the sea turtle babies are off to a good start thanks to efforts of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service and the Share the Beach volunteers.
You can adopt a sea turtle nest from Share the Beach—a wonderful gift for a sea turtle lover!
