Rosie O’Donnell and other lesbians should be interested in this research. It sounds as if there could be natural ways for a female to have children without having a man in the picture.
Or maybe it’s those estrogens and other female hormones from birth control pills entering rivers and streams via the toilet, that’s causing male fish to develop ovaries.
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=1a624943-4a0e-4358-b5c4-a0f887cbe480
Pumped full of estrogen, fish are too confused to mate
Hormone flushed into rivers, lakes. Feminized male minnows grew ovary-type tissue and produced eggs, researchers say
TOM SPEARS, CanWest News Service
Published: Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Estrogen that goes down Canadian toilets - some naturally from women, some from the Pill - is enough to make entire fish species too feminine to reproduce, a seven-year Canadian study shows.
Fish scientist Karen Kidd dripped small amounts of estrogen into a clean lake in northwestern Ontario over several years, just as if urine with the female hormone were running in via sewage from a nearby city.
This constant hormone bath made male minnows produce eggs in unnatural, part-female sex organs.
And even after she stopped adding estrogen and the water turned clean again, the minnows almost completely disappeared for several years.
Even small concentrations of estrogen can decimate wild fish populations, the University of New Brunswick biology professor concludes, even at levels found in some Canadian waters. She wouldn’t name individual rivers.
And while the minnows were prone to fast extinction because of their short lifespan (about two years), she says bigger fish like trout or pike might also be hurt if they are exposed for long enough.
The first dramatic news of “feminized” fish came from British rivers in the 1990s where male fish near sewage plants were producing eggs and carrying reproductive organs that were partly female.
“A lot of follow-up studies showed it was the natural estrogens that women excrete and then the synthetic estrogens in birth control pills that were the main causes of feminization in male fish,” Kidd said.
“The Pill is one of the most heavily prescribed pharmaceuticals in the world. There are over a million women on it in Canada.”
She chose to conduct her experiment in an unpolluted lake with healthy fish to learn what damage estrogen would cause.
Male minnows in water with estrogen just stopped looking male. Where they should have distinct colours and bumps at spawning time, they didn’t have any visible sign of maleness.
“And then when you opened them up, their testes were much smaller than they should have been” - about one-third the normal size. By the third year of adding estrogen to the lake, the testes had ovary-type tissue, and were producing eggs - a condition called “intersex.”
It’s exactly what scientists had seen in the wild. The achievement is in reproducing this effect in a previously clean lake, proving that estrogen is the cause.
Meanwhile, the female fish produced eggs more slowly.
The Kidd team found these effects early, but continued the study for several years to see what would happen. And the whole minnow population crashed.
“That was the big question: What does it mean for the fish population? We’ve shown that it has profound effects on the fathead minnow.”
If minnows don’t sound very exciting, Kidd notes they are a staple source of food for bigger fish across North America, right up to lake trout and northern pike. Killing the minnows in a lake is like taking wheat or rice out of the human food supply.
The last estrogen went into the lake in 2003.
Since then, bacteria and sunlight have broken down the estrogen and the water quickly returned to normal. The minnow population, however, took a further two years to recover.
© The Gazette (Montreal) 2007
Or adoption.