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

10. Bureaucratic Strangulation

{ 172 } CHAPTER 10 BUREAUCRATIC STRANGULATION 7 After the reaction to September’s press conference and the media coverage cooled down, I hoped work would go more smoothly. But I’d had this thought before. Dorothy took a couple of months off to finish her master’s thesis, and, as we expected, she quit her job as fieldwork coordinator when she returned. Without her assistance we faced anew the tensions of trying to manage the frog work and our wetlands projects. Mark and I agreed: this time we couldn’t do both. Dorothy’s crews had worked intensely during the summer of 1997. They’d surveyed and confirmed thirty-seven new ponds that had significant numbers of deformed frogs in twenty-nine different counties. They’d shipped numerous samples of frogs and heavy coolers of pond water to several scientists who worked with us. Eighty-three new reports came in from citizens, meaning that since the students’ discovery at the Ney Pond in 1995, we had accumulated more than two hundred locations in Minnesota with deformed frogs. The broader picture was just as grim. Thirty states had submitted records to the federal amphibian center’s database on deformed frogs. In Vermont alone, volunteers doing frog surveys found an average of 7 percent deformed frogs in half of the sixty towns they monitored. At the meeting in Prague that summer, I had learned that significant numbers of deformed frogs had been observed in several other countries as well, particularly Russia and Japan. { 173 } BUREAUCRATIC STRANGULATION The epidemic of deformed frogs spread unchecked, while progress toward solving the mystery crept slowly forward. The lab tests by NIEHS showed us that something in the water caused deformities in early-stage embryos of frogs. Their analysis of the water chemistry continued. Jim Burkhart called me one day with a new result. “Adding thyroid hormone to the pond water prevents the defects from forming,” he said, excited. Jim’s lab had identified some suspicious chemicals, like one that inhibited the action of thyroid hormone. But water and sediment samples from several other sites hadn’t been worked up yet, much to my disappointment. By then we were all anxious to find answers. I was afraid that Jim’s agency would not have the resources after all to tackle the analysis of all the water samples we had shipped from several other ponds. As time passed, I worried that the chemicals in those samples might degrade while being held in their lab’s cooler or freezer. Were they exceeding their “holding times,” beyond which the results of analysis would not be considered scientifically valid? All that work to collect and ship them. I couldn’t think about it. I began to wonder whether pinpointing the exact cause of the deformities in frogs could be accomplished in only a few years. The causes of more than 60 percent of human birth defects had no explanation. Would frogs be any different ? But frog deformities had surged suddenly during the 1990s, far more than ever recorded before. That I knew of, such a sharp increase hadn’t happened with rates of human birth defects during that time period. Perhaps they surged decades earlier, after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan or when US planes doused Vietnam with dioxin-contaminated herbicides. During the 1990s, something was different in frog habitats in many regions . Frog populations were declining in several areas of the world and malformations were increasing. The widespread and sudden increases in those years raised my hope that explanations would, eventually, emerge. Something had changed, but what? In the fall of 1997, MPCA staff hydrologists planned to sample the groundwater near additional ponds that had produced deformed frogs. This was a follow-up after our contentious discovery that some homeowners’ wells had water that caused deformities in frog embryos. Our hydrologists would install test wells, which they jokingly called “access tubes,” to avoid a work slowdown if they applied for well-drilling permits from the Health Department. Would groundwater from other locations than the handful of wells tested that summer also be toxic to frogs? Might contaminated groundwater be seeping into the shallows at the edges of frog ponds? { 174 } CHAPTER 10 As winter approached, the ground was starting to harden, and our hydrologists needed to get out to the sites right away. With Dorothy gone, I attended...