I always suspected golfers had an extra chromosome or two – what with their fondness for flashy plaids and saddle shoes, and if you play in Florida that risk goes double …
… but it pales in comparison to my compulsion for brightly colored yarns, how I squeal in glee over some fellow’s Czech nymph that dared to match lavender and a hint of pink on an insect that owns neither.
Wash your hands after putting up the Christmas tree – as you may contract both; a fascination with dimpled white balls followed by a shopping orgy at the local fabric store.
It’s atrazine actually, 76.4 million pounds applied each year – and a couple of stiff jolts will turn your X’s into Y’s – especially if you’re a frog. If you’re not a frog, then it just scrambles everything and you’re dead.
A new study has found that male frogs exposed to the herbicide atrazine — one of the most common man-made chemicals found in U.S. waters — can make a startling developmental U-turn, becoming so completely female that they can mate and lay viable eggs.
The local physician noted my nervous tic, as I described a burgeoning passion for brightly colored yarns, and he studied my fly box with great interest. While I giggled uncontrollably he pronounced sentence, “You’ve been smoking it, wading in it, or drinking it – in either case, stop.”
He did mention I can gauge exposure by examining my muddy footprints, how if I start walking on tiptoe, I’m approaching critical thresholds.
Atrazine is used on corn (field and sweet), sorghum, sugarcane, wheat (application to wheat stubble on fallow land following harvest), guava, macadamia nuts, hay, pasture, summer fallow, forestry or woodlands, conifers, woody ornamentals, Christmas trees, sod, and residential and recreational turf (parks, golf courses). Given the specific nature of the turf uses, much of atrazine’s use on lawns is confined to Florida and the Southeast.
But it’s much worse than mere frogs changing sexual identity, it may explain why most anglers find it difficult to relate to the female gender (irritating them mostly) – and why we insist on the Supermodel fantasy.
The other 90 percent of the exposed frogs retained some male features, Hayes said, but often had lower testosterone levels and fertility. When competing for female frogs’ attentions, atrazine-treated males frequently lost out to males that hadn’t been treated.
Considering the above exposure was less than the EPA mandated tolerance for drinking water, we may want to switch to hard liquor for our Cheerios – as that list didn’t contain oats.
Sygenta, the Swiss agribusiness conglomerate is disputing the finding, as is the EPA which will be reviewing the work. In the meantime we can add Atrazine to the long list of potential gender changing chemicals our fish are enduring.
Female hormones, atrazine, and birth control residue – and the poor guy from IGFA trying to determine whether an asterisk is warranted, or lump it under she-male.
Tags: agricultural effluent, gender changing, golfing, tiptoe, brownlining, sharp toed frog, Sygenta, EPA
On the hundredth post I asked, “I wrote 99, surely you can write one” – but it was an epic fail. I’d already run out of things to say after the 16th article and it showed.
While the blaring indictments no longer grace the newspapers, it appears another executive has been indicted in what remains of the Madoff debacle.
It started with some small pretense of fairness, Senator Feinstein’s call for a review of the environmental opinion on the Sacramento Delta, an effort to ferret out the “flawed science” that dared put fish before the needs of farms and her pals at the Westland’s Water district.
Patronizing my local fly shop has never been a issue. Guys like me always look for the rack of shopping carts when we enter – despite already owning everything.
Small shards of humor are intruding into flu enforced idleness – sure signs of a return to sparkling good health. 
Singlebarbed reader “