Journal: Science News
Author: Janet Raloff
Date Published: November 22, 2008
Page: 12
Amphibian populations around the world have recently been in decline. Val R. Beasely and his colleagues at the University of Illinois discovered that the prescence of Atrazine, the second-most widely used agricultural pesticide in America, causes the likelihood that parasitic flatworms will thrive in the frog's ponds to increase. Additionally, this pesticide diminishes the larval frong's ability to fight these infections. The researchers raised young tadpoles in tanks. The tanks in which the atrazine was present had a higher population of snails which hosted the parasitic flatworms which caused infections in the amphibians. Additionally, the surviving frogs in the atrazine tanks had substantially weaker imune systems and less imune cells which would fight off the infections.
This article is an example of hypothesis based science as the researchers conducted an experiment in order to prove that the atrazine was a possible cause for the declining amphibian population.
This finding can allow us to stop the amphibian population from falling any further or even becoming extinct, saving a crucial part of pond ecosystems.
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