Peril in the Ponds: Deformed Frogs, Politics, and a Biologist's Quest

Introduction

{ 1 } INTRODUCTION 7 I knelt on the ground in my oversize rubber waders and peered into the metal pan. Its water danced with small creatures we’d just netted from the pristinelooking river below. A variety of immature insects swam about: armored dragon flies and pebble-cased caddis flies, dark-bodied beetles and bugs. Other invertebrates—tiny crustaceans and elegantly spired snails—crawled along the bottom of the tray. I looked down at the San Marcos, its clear blue water sparkling in the midday sun. Who knew it harbored such a diversity of life? A thirty-something mother, I was taking this course in aquatic ecology as part of my quest for a new direction in life, one I hoped could support our young family. A dozen years had elapsed since my first graduate work in zoology. I knew I’d be starting all over. Would I return to my early interest in cell and molecular biology—or try environmental law? My husband held a temporary teaching position at a small college in Texas for the academic year. The coming summer we would have to move, but where? That day our aquatics class had also dipnetted the murky water of a river known to be heavily polluted. The results were disappointing: a few squirmy worms, some red insect larvae, a snail or two. Something shifted in me then. Why this stark difference? Seeing the lively organisms we’d taken from clean water and the sluggish poverty from the polluted river pushed me onto a new path. This was it. I wanted to protect aquatic organisms from water pollution . To accomplish this, I needed advanced training and decided to enter a { 2 } INTRODUCTION graduate program at the University of Minnesota, where we’d be closer to our extended family. By the end of the academic year we packed up and headed north from Texas to Minnesota, where I started a PhD program in zoology. With abundant lakes and streams, Minnesota would be a fine place to study aquatic ecology and, hopefully, secure a relevant job. Viewing that tray of wiggling water creatures in the mid-1970s, I had no idea that twenty years ahead I would be analyzing tiny aquatic animals to measure the biological health of wetlands; that the EPA would support my work as a research scientist in a state pollution control agency; that I’d be wading into muddy-bottomed swamps to dipnet the invertebrates and let them tell me if the water was polluted or not. I had no idea then that over the next two decades biologists would document the extinctions of several species of frogs from areas in Australia and Costa Rica. Nor did I know that many other global populations of frogs and amphibians would decline sharply. I couldn’t have foreseen that, in the future, I’d be crouching down on damp grass to examine young frogs I’d netted from wetlands; that I’d be repeatedly shocked by what I saw: a completely absent leg, a stump instead of a limb, two feet branching from one joint, a missing eye, or an extra leg flopping uselessly to one side. And I couldn’t foresee that much of my work in the 1990s, aimed at protecting wetlands and understanding why frogs had deformities, would be controversial. As early as the 1960s, warning signals of human-caused damage to the environment and to its living creatures were widespread and attracting attention. It wasn’t just the disastrous oil spill that polluted Santa Barbara’s beaches in California or the notorious Cuyahoga River in Ohio, where a half-foot floating slick of waste oil repeatedly caught fire and burned for days at a time. It was robins quivering and dropping dead after eating DDT-laden earthworms. It was reports that radioactive fallout from nuclear bomb tests in Nevada appeared in the teeth and bones of children who drank milk from cows that had grazed on contaminated grass. Shocking pictures of malformed babies born with deformed or missing limbs caused by the drug thalidomide given to pregnant women alerted the public that pharmaceuticals could be hazardous to the fetus. In 1962, the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring focused and intensified the general public’s growing concerns about the health of the environment. Carson exposed the dangers of commonly used pesticides and the appalling lack of government testing and regulation. She taught us how [18.117.183.150] Project MUSE (2024-04...