The Effects of Chemicals on Animals

Atrazine is a chemical used to stop the growth of weeds in crops.  It is banned in Europe because of its affects on the environment but is still being sprayed in the U.S.  Tyrone Hayes, of UC Berkeley, discovered atrazine's affects on the Northern leopard frog.  Rain and wind can spread atrazine into the frog's habitat and cause the testosterone in males to turn into the female hormone estrogen.  In effect, the frogs are hermaphrodites.  The only frogs that were actually affected were the ones that lived in the water that contained atrazine, but it only takes 0.1 part per billion of atrazine to affect the water to cause the deformity. Beluga whales in the St. Lawrence river are also experiencing problems with chemical levels in the water.  Tests on these chemically affected whales show that cancer rates have gone up incredibly.  When the chemicals get inside the whale's body, they inhibit healthy cells from reproducing, causing cell deformity, which can cause cancer.  Some whales are so absorbed with toxic chemicals that they are classified as toxic waste when they wash up on shore.  

These chemicals are starting to get into human water sources.  In Missouri, the tap water that people drink affect the quality of seamen in men.  Seamen quality in these men were poorer than those of men in Los Angeles, New York, and Minneapolis, which are highly industrialized cities.  These chemicals are fou

nd in Missouri's tap water because of the pesticides used on crops on the state's farmland that get into the water sources.  If higher concentrations of these chemicals get into our water sources, more and more deformities will occur, deformities that we have never seen before.  If these chemicals are not cleaned up out of our environment, we will eventually experience the effects of our own corruption on the planet.

The Earth is Our Responsibility

I just did a report for a class of mine about coral bleaching and it really opened up my eyes on some things.  It made me realize that the earth is our responsibility.  We need to take care of it and improve its conditions or else our great grandchildren are not going to have a great life.  Global warming is a real danger and it is affecting not only us, but every animal on the planet.  It is caused by us and we need to stop it, or at least control it, before we destroy the earth and make it uninhabitable.  We are releasing carbon dioxide into the air along with methane and they are trapping heat inside the earth's atmosphere.  This carbon dioxide is caused by many different things.  Overpopulation, which leads to more people, which leads to more breathing and exhaling of carbon dioxide.  We are destroying the trees that turn this carbon dioxide into breathable oxygen in order to make more land for more people to live on because there isn't enough room for all the people on earth!  The producing of food also causes the release of these gases because the more agriculture there is, the more manure we must use and manure contains and releases methane.  These gases are contributing to the deaths of coral reefs, which are home to many marine animals.  Global warming is a gigantic circle and the worst is yet to come.  Hurricane Katrina will be the norm in a few years if we don't do something about these issues.