It's all part of my evil plan....

Frogs, salamanders and other amphibians began to sprout extra legs. In heavily polluted Lake Apopka, one of the largest lakes in Florida, male alligators developed stunted genitals.

In the Potomac watershed near Washington, male smallmouth bass have rapidly transformed into “intersex fish” that display female characteristics. This was discovered only in 2003, but the latest survey found that more than 80 percent of the male smallmouth bass in the Potomac are producing eggs.

Now scientists are connecting the dots with evidence of increasing abnormalities among humans, particularly large increases in numbers of genital deformities among newborn boys. For example, up to 7 percent of boys are now born with undescended testicles, although this often self-corrects over time. And up to 1 percent of boys in the United States are now born with hypospadias, in which the urethra exits the penis improperly, such as at the base rather than the tip.

Apprehension is growing among many scientists that the cause of all this may be a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors. They are very widely used in agriculture, industry and consumer products. Some also enter the water supply when estrogens in human urine — compounded when a woman is on the pill — pass through sewage systems and then through water treatment plants.

These endocrine disruptors have complex effects on the human body, particularly during fetal development of males.

“A lot of these compounds act as weak estrogen, so that’s why developing males — whether smallmouth bass or humans — tend to be more sensitive,” said Robert Lawrence, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s scary, very scary.”

The scientific case is still far from proven, as chemical companies emphasize, and the uncertainties for humans are vast. But there is accumulating evidence that male sperm count is dropping and that genital abnormalities in newborn boys are increasing. Some studies show correlations between these abnormalities and mothers who have greater exposure to these chemicals during pregnancy, through everything from hair spray to the water they drink.

Endocrine disruptors also affect females. It is now well established that DES, a synthetic estrogen given to many pregnant women from the 1930s to the 1970s to prevent miscarriages, caused abnormalities in the children. They seemed fine at birth, but girls born to those women have been more likely to develop misshaped sexual organs and cancer.

There is also some evidence from both humans and monkeys that endometriosis, a gynecological disorder, is linked to exposure to endocrine disruptors. Researchers also suspect that the disruptors can cause early puberty in girls.

A rush of new research has also tied endocrine disruptors to obesity, insulin resistance and diabetes, in both animals and humans. For example, mice exposed in utero even to low doses of endocrine disruptors appear normal at first but develop excess abdominal body fat as adults.

Among some scientists, there is real apprehension at the new findings — nothing is more terrifying than reading The Journal of Pediatric Urology — but there hasn’t been much public notice or government action.

This month, the Endocrine Society, an organization of scientists specializing in this field, issued a landmark 50-page statement. It should be a wake-up call.

“We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology,” the society declared.

“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”

The Environmental Protection Agency is moving toward screening endocrine disrupting chemicals, but at a glacial pace. For now, these chemicals continue to be widely used in agricultural pesticides and industrial compounds. Everybody is exposed.

“We should be concerned,” said Dr. Ted Schettler of the Science and Environmental Health Network. “This can influence brain development, sperm counts or susceptibility to cancer, even where the animal at birth seems perfectly normal.”

The most notorious example of water pollution occurred in 1969, when the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire and helped shock America into adopting the Clean Water Act. Since then, complacency has taken hold.

Those deformed frogs and intersex fish — not to mention the growing number of deformities in newborn boys — should jolt us once again.

Courtesy New York Times

Drewes two-inch fungal phallus

In the upcoming issue of the journal Mycologia, scientists describe a new species of stinkhorn fungus from Africa, which they christened Phallus drewesii in honor of their expedition leader.

“I am utterly delighted,” Drewes told the San Jose Mercury News, “The funny thing is that it is the second smallest known mushroom in this genus and it grows sideways, almost limp.”

As the California Academy of Sciences’ curator of herpetology, Drewes has spent his career wrangling snakes and chasing after frogs. Since 2001, he has been leading scientific expeditions to the sparsely populated islands of Sâo Tomé and Príncipe off the coast of West Africa, home to hundreds of plant and animal species found nowhere else on earth.

In 2006, he made the mistake of bringing along his longtime friend, Dennis Desjardin, a mushroom expert at San Francisco State University who recognized the phallic fungus sprouting from a piece of wood as new to science. Stinkhorns like Phallus drewsii, are found mostly in the tropics and their characteristic shape helps them emit an odor of dung or carrion that attracts flies to disperse their spores. The stinkhorn was one of 225 fungus species that expedition scientists collected during two trips to the region, and it is the third species named after Drewes, who also has a snake and a frog to call his own.

“None of my colleagues . . . will let me live it down,” Drewes told the newspaper, “But I love it. It is a form of immortality.”

Courtesy Scientific American

Losers and winners are not always the case in hermamphrodites. Often both are winners in which a mutual exhange of sperm occurs.

Courtesy Deep Sea News

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Lizard She-males Get Ahead

Just wait until those Japanese Porn-anime creators get a hold of this

Courtesy ScienceBlogs.com

Augrabies Flat Lizard 'she-males' can survive longer by avoiding competition from older men. Image: Martin Whiting, WITS

As juveniles, all males look like females before gradually developing extravagant adult male coloration at the onset of sexual maturity. These young males are most vulnerable to aggressive adult male rivals when these first tell-tale signs of masculinity begin to develop and adults are quick to capitalise on a soft target by chasing and sometimes biting these young males.

Assoc. Prof. Whiting pointed out that “by delaying the onset of colour to a more convenient period, these males (termed she-males) are making the best of a bad situation”. An immediate advantage is freedom of movement in the normally treacherous zones which make up the territories of highly aggressive males that already have extensive fighting experience. At the same time, these female mimics are able to court the myriad of females that share the territorial male’s residence.

The authors of this study (Assoc. Prof. Martin Whiting of the University of the Witwatersrand; Dr. Jonathan Webb of the University of Sydney; and Assoc. Prof. Scott Keogh of the Australian National University) also tested whether she-males are able to mimic the chemical ‘signature’ of females.

In a clever experiment performed in the wild, they removed all pheromones and skin lipids that might signal gender and relabelled a group of females and she-males with either male or female scent, before presenting them to typical adult males. Males use their tongues to sample chemical scent and responded by courting she-males labeled as females, but not she-males labeled as males. “Males are fooled by looks, but not by scent” said Dr. Webb.

She-males are able to maintain this deception by staying one step ahead of a prying male, and thereby avoiding a nosey tongue that might give the game away. Assoc. Prof. Keogh said that “young transvestite males appear to have a dual advantage: the avoidance of potentially dangerous bouts with dominant males and access to normally inaccessible females”.

Courtesy Science Alert

It’s no surprise then that females sustain heavy injuries during sex. But why have male beetles evolved such hellish genitals? What benefits do they gain by physically harming their partners?

It’s possible that the injuries directly benefit the males, either because they stop the females from mating again or spend more efforts in raising their fertilised eggs to avoid the strain of future liaisons.

The alternative is that the spikes could give the males an edge in “sperm competitions”, where they compete with rivals not through direct combat, but through fertilising as many eggs as possible. In this theory, the spines are important for winning these competitions, and the wounds they inflict are simply a nasty side-effect.

Cosima Hotzy and Goran Arnqvist from Uppsala University think that the latter theory is right. They have found that the penile spines are vital to a male’s success – those with the longest spikes fertilise the most eggs and father the most young. Size, it seems, really does matter.

The duo studied beetles taken from 13 countries across the tropics, from Brazil to the USA, and from Nigeria to Oman. The genitals of these different populations are very varied and to study them under a microscope, Hotzy and Arnqvist first had to fluff their subjects. They anaesthetised the males with carbon dioxide, and erected their penises with an “artificial inflater” – a microscopic plastic tip connected to a pump. Under a microscope, they measured the length of the longest spines and the size of the entire spine-bearing area.

They studied female beetles too, and all from a single population. Each one was allowed to mate once with a single male. A week later, Hotzy and Arnqvist dissected their sexual tracts to see how much scarring they had, using the distinctive black pigments on the scars to spot them. As you might expect, the males with the spiniest genitals inflicted the most amount of scarring on the females, in a way that was independent of the partners’ overall body size.

To measures the effects of these spines on the males’ reproductive success, the duo first mated virgin females with males from a single Nigerian population, who had all been sterilised by radiation. Two days later, the females were then paired with a second male, taken from one of the 13 worldwide populations. One week later, they counted all the eggs she laid. Every one of these must have been fathered by the second male, so their number represents his ability to successfully oust the sterile sperm of the first partner.

Again, the males with the longest penile spines were more likely to be the victors of the sperm competition and again, this link had nothing to do with either the male’s body size or his general health. The degree of scarring in the females was also linked to the male’s success at sperm competition, but to a much lesser extent and certainly not when the length of the spines was taken into account. It is the spines, rather than the damage they inflict, that is the key to the male’s success.

It’s not entirely clear what exactly the spines do. They could anchor the male during sex, position his penis in the right spot during sex, or scrape out the sperm of rivals from the female’s genitals. Either way, they have clearly evolved to allow the male seed beetle to out-ejaculate his rivals.

This fierce competition for fertilisation rights is fairly common among insects and has led to the evolution of some truly horrific sexual strategies. The seed beetle is far from the only example of what Hotzy and Arnqvist call “sexually antagonistic co-evolution”.

Some species, like the dung fly, also have armoured genitals. Others, like the familiar fly Drosophila melanogaster, have toxic semen laden with chemicals that actually slash the lifespans of females, who can literally mate their way to death. But even here, the effect of this lethal cocktail isn’t the early death of the female; that’s an unfortunate side-effect. Their goal is to encourage the female to lay more eggs or reject further suitors, or even kill the sperm of other males.

And possibly the most cringeworthy sexual technique of all belongs to the male bed bug, whose penis is like a hypodermic needle. He stabs it through the female’s back and injects his semen straight into her abdominal cavity. It’s a method that’s been appropriately named “traumatic insemination”.

Now, for anyone who has managed to stick this through (and believe me, I’ve been wincing with every keystroke), female insects have evolved their own defences. The female seed beetle, for example, has a huge amount of connective tissue lining her sexual tracts so that the damage inflicted by the males doesn’t affect her too badly. She also takes a more direct approach to protecting herself – when she’s had enough, she simply kicks the male until he lets go. Doing so cuts the total length of mating by a third – this is one species where the females want the males to ejaculate sooner.

Courtesy ScienceBlogs.com