Singing starlings: why...boys are being born "girls" (estrogen pollution gender-bending the planet)

Daily Mail (UK) ^ | 27th February 2008 | GEOFFREY LEAN

[Mrs. Don-o]

Next time you hear a starling sing, stop and listen hard. It may well be warning of a peril that endangers the whole world of nature - and the very future of the human race itself.

For scientists have found that gender-bender chemicals - increasingly contaminating the environment, our food, our water and our bodies - are having a bizarre effect on common birds, causing the males to give voice to longer and more complex songs.

This is only the latest in a long series of increasingly urgent alarms being sounded by wildlife against an insidious but devastating danger that threatens our children.

But so far our leaders have steadfastly and scandalously turned a deaf ear to them - and, even more shamefully, ignored the first signs that the peril is already affecting birth patterns, causing thousands of babies who should have been boys to be born as girls instead.

Starlings and their diverse, complicated and mimicking - though not beautiful - songs have long fascinated humanity.

Mozart was entranced by a starling after it copied a tune that the great composer was whistling in a pet store.

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Scientists have found that gender-bending chemicals have caused male Starlings to sing longer and more complex songs

Modern scientists have discovered that starlings' songs contain similar patterns to human speech.

But if we could, indeed, understand what they are communicating, we would be wise to take heed.

Scientists at Cardiff University have discovered that the brains of male starlings foraging for worms at a sewage treatment works in South-West England have been subtly changed by being contaminated by oestrogen from the contraceptive pill and hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

The female hormones - present in women's urine, and passing through the sewage treatment unaffected - caused the part of the brain that controls their song to grow much bigger, causing them to sing at greater length and with even more virtuosity than usual.

The study confirms similar, if slightly differing, research on other birds, which scientists say is adding up to some of the first concrete proof of the effects of gender benders on the natural world.

Researchers at the University of California have found that feeding female finches with a hormone used in HRT has caused them to sing, something hitherto done only by their males.

And studies at the University of Alberta have found robins exposed to the pesticide DDT before birth suffered damage to the region of the brain that enables them to sing and protect their territory.

Dr David Crews of the University of Texas calls the research on birdsong "very significant", describing it as "the first step needed to demonstrate a causal link between specific pollutants and the effects on wildlife populations".

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Researchers have calculated that 250,000 baby girls should have been born boys in the U.S. and Japan alone

Yet there have been strange warning signs for decades. Way back in the early 1970s, researchers found that female gulls had taken to nesting together all over the U.S., the males having apparently lost interest.

When the bashful males were caught and examined, they were found to have developed female egg-laying canals.

In the 1980s, researchers in Florida found that alligators were failing to reproduce because their males had mysteriously tiny penises; further investigations revealed that they had developed female hormone patterns - and that turtles in the same waters had developed into hermaphrodites.

Most alarming of all, repeated studies by Britain's own Environment Agency have shown that about a third of the male roach in rivers and streams right across the country have begun producing eggs, after developing female sex organs.

Again, the problem was traced to oestrogen passing through sewage works - in some areas, near particularly heavy inflows of treated water, all the males were found to be between sexes.

The findings have inevitably raised concern that people may also be affected, since one-third of the country's drinking water comes from rivers, much of it beneath sewage outfalls.

And, whether or not this is the cause, male sperm counts have been dropping precipitously both here and across the world.

Fertile

Studies in more than 20 countries have shown that average amounts have fallen by well over half in the past 50 years, from an average of more than 150 million per millilitre to 66 million.

The result is that men are now less than half as fertile as hamsters.

The counts are continuing to plunge by two per cent a year, and no end to the decline is in sight. At this rate, the average man will be unable to father children within decades.

Increasingly the sperm crisis is being blamed on a whole host of chemicals, not just synthetic oestrogen, but a wide variety of substances that have become ubiquitous in daily life.

They include the common plastic PVC; dioxins, the notorious pollutants found almost everywhere; PCBs, one-and-a-half million tons of which have been used in countless products from paints to plastics; and phthalates, universally used to make plastics more flexible.

Recent tests by WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) on 14 basic foodstuffs taken from supermarket shelves found that every single one contained PCBs, and most were contaminated by phthalates.

Both substances have been shown to have deeply worrying effects on babies and children.

Scientists at Rotterdam's Erasmus University have found that boys born to mothers exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea-sets.

And research at the University of Rochester in New York State has shown that the male children of women exposed to phthalates have smaller penises and other signs of feminisation of their genitals.

Communities exposed to high levels of these and other gender-bender chemicals, from the Great Lakes of North America to the Russian Arctic, have been found to give birth to twice as many girls as boys.

This may offer a clue to the cause of a mysterious shift in the sex of babies worldwide.

Conflict

Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls, in what is thought to be nature's way of compensating for the fact that males were more likely to be killed hunting or in conflict.

But increasingly this ratio is slipping - it is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born girls in the U.S. and Japan alone.

You would think that all this accumulating evidence would long since have sparked alarm in governments worldwide.

Far from it. When the EU drew up its first comprehensive controls on chemicals two years ago, it largely exempted gender benders from them.

Britain, under Tony Blair's leadership, was largely responsible for this exemption, and confidential documents show that it obediently acted to water down the controls following direct representations from the Bush administration - almost unbelievably putting the interests of foreign firms above the health of British children.

Since then, as Dr Gwynne Lyons, director of the expert group, CHEM Trust puts it, there has been "regulatory inertia".

That needs to change, and fast. If ministers continue wilfully to refuse to heed the science, they should, at least, listen to the starlings.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Alligators with shriveled penises! Starling males with warbles and giggles! Hormonal angst amongst the amphibians! Freaky effeminate fish!

It seems most unfair that with our pollution effluents we're queering the gender of all the species on earth.

But as long a oral contraceptives are seen as essential to the liberated woman, and male effeminacy is seen as a new horizon in GLBTQQIXYT? human rights, it's not going to be politically correct to do anything about it now, is it?

Goodbye normal gender, goodbye next generations. Goodbye, strangely changed Planet of Life. Gone with the gonads!

[Elpasser]

RUN FOR YOUR LIFE, THE SKY IF FALLING ALERT

[glorgau]

The most polluted place on earth must be San Francisco Bay.

[buffyt]

Well I knew a girl when I was growing up in the 1950s who was born both male and female. Since then I have known two more. I knew a girl who was born without a uterus. I knew a girl who was born with TWO. Birth defects happen.

[stinkerpot65]

Well, that would explain San Fransisco.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Ping-a-ling

[Tax-chick]

it is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born girls in the U.S. and Japan alone.

Yes, well that doesn't begin to make up for the millions of girls killed in sex-selection abortions.

I have a feeling that this whole thing is a hoo-hah intended to support the position that homosexuals aren't in any way responsible for their behavior.

[Mrs. Don-o]

"RUN FOR YOUR LIFE, THE SKY IS FALLING ALERT"

Well, no, not the sky. The testosterone levels. The sperm counts. Birthrates worldwide, and not just for humans.

Other than that, no cause for alarm.

[MacDorcha]

The part that made me stop was where it stated that “normally there are 106 males births to every 100 female.”

This is an outright lie. It is on average about 100 to 100 and deviated one way or the other several times in history. This is something taught in biology in middle school.

Some times one gender is favored more than the other, but then, sometimes you flip a coin and get nothing but “heads” for 20 flips.

I will note that no small part of this is coming from the standpoint that it’s about pollution.

Seems we have some Goreans trying to convert a few Darwinists.

[wideawake]

If only that backward old reactionary Benedict XVI would stop opposing artificial contraception!

[ExpatGator]

I would have ran from that neighborhood on all three of my feet while not even looking back with my five eyes!

[Mrs. Don-o]

Actually, I was surprised to see this printed in a mainstream newspaper, because it implies there's somehing actually wrong, pathological, about gender confusion, and that the solution might involve curbing hormonal contraceptives.

I've been reading about this for 15 years in the scientific press, but it's oddly never (til now) made the mainstream media. If you google endocrine disruption estrogen fish amphibians, though, you'll get 44,400 results.

[SE Mom]

Thanks for posting this- I don’t doubt the truth of the article- it’s a good deal more serious to me than global warming/cooling/lukewarm foolishness.

[PzLdr]

It would explain the Democrats...

[NYer]

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HUMANAE VITAE

Neither is it valid to argue, as a justification for sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive, that a lesser evil is to be preferred to a greater one, or that such intercourse would merge with procreative acts of past and future to form a single entity, and so be qualified by exactly the same moral goodness as these. Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good," it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it (18)—in other words, to intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order, and which must therefore be judged unworthy of man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general. Consequently, it is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong.

HUMANAE VITAE

[Larry Lucido]

We're doomed!

We're moody!

[baa39]

FYI, there was an article about it (estrogen in the water supply) last month in the journal of the American Life League (ALL), “Celebrate Life.”

[neverdem]

One more added to the endocrine disruptors keyword list.

[TenthAmendmentChampion]

And of course, it’s Bush’s fault.

[baa39]

From the same encyclical, this may also be apropos:

“...the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act...

“The reason is that the fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life — and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman...

“And if each of these essential qualities, the unitive and the procreative, is preserved, the use of marriage fully retains its sense of true mutual love and its ordination to the supreme responsibility of parenthood to which man is called.”