Male Bass in Potomac Producing Eggs

Shakrai writes "The Washington Post is carrying a story about how male bass in the Potomac river are actually producing eggs. The source of this interesting phenomena is currently unknown. Scientists are speculating that it may have something to do with chicken estrogen left over in manure or perhaps even human hormones dumped in the river from sewage treatment plants. Scientists aren't sure if the affected fish are still able to reproduce and the long-term repercussions of this find are unknown."

Comments

Fish aren't the only things with this problem....

[rubberbando]

Here is an article showing it happening to other species.

Re:WTF?

[Kobal]

Actually, used birth control pills count here. Oestrogens are sulfo-conjugated, and then eliminated in urine. By the way, premarin is nothing else than equine sulfo-conjugated oestrogens.
Other oestrogenic endocrine disruptors include soy products (esp. after metabolization of genistein and daidzein into equol by the intestinal flora), heavy metals (esp. Cadmium; though I suspect hair metal could have some effect along the same line), many phytosanitary chemicals (DDT was a prime exemple, but atrazine and pyrethrenoids aren't bad either), as well as a whole lot of chemicals containing one or several phenol groups.

But did you ask if it was NORMAL?

[Engineer-Poet]

Sex-changing in fish is sufficiently unusual that discoveries of species which do it make the scientific literature. If it was normal in bass, we'd certainly have learned about it long before now.

In this case, it's much worse than that. The fish's testicular tissue is claimed to have produced eggs, but you might notice that the article didn't mention anything about the morphological changes required to become a functioning female. If you began producing ova in your nuts would that make you female in any meaningful sense of the word, or just ill?

This phenomenon needs to be analyzed, the cause identified and stopped. If we don't do this, we're going to lose things starting with the fish, and continuing up to ourselves - and if this doesn't worry you, spend some time looking up the literature on hormone mimics, phthalate and the other disturbing stuff that gets to us in eerie ways like leaching out of baby bottles.