Current Event

When Frog Gender Flips
March 24 2010
web, Science News for Kids
http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20100324/Note2.asp

A student called Ngoc Mai Nguyen at the Californian college was doing a experiment with male frogs. One day she went to check up on these frogs and realized that some of the frogs were acting like female frogs. She went and reported this to her biologist boss Tyrone Hayes. Hayes did experiments with male frogs and found out that a chemical called atrazine(used as weed killer) affected the frogs. The atrazine affects the frogs that were born in water that atrazine was put in. Hayes did another experiment were he put 40 male frogs in to a water tank with atrazine and 4 of them started acting like females. They dissected 2 and found out they have female reproductive organs, the other two were mated with normal male frogs and both had male babies.

This relates two are study of animals and organisms in class. If this continues the frog specie can become endangered. This is a serious problem because many animals depend on frogs as food but also shelter. If frogs disappear they will disrupt many ecosystems and biomes.

I found this article on the site " Science News for Kids" and it really drew my attention because the disappearance of frogs won't be good or helpful for anybody. I enjoyed reading this article because I learned a lot from it. I think the article was written really well, and by reading it I learned that we have yet another problem.