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Last update : 28-03-2008 02:32

Original Article: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/02/sex-changing-ch.html
If you go to the web page and start following the links, you go , wtf?  This is yet another article about how the pollution of our environment is changing nature, and could therefore be changing us.

Sex-Changing Chemicals Make Male Starlings Sing Sweet Songs
By Brandon Keim February 29, 2008 | 4:49:22 PM

Categories: Animals, Environment 

Pollutants that turn male fish into females have an unexpected effect on starlings: they cause the guys to sing sweet songs that lady starlings find irresistible.

In a study published this week in Public Library of Science ONE, researchers from Cardiff University studied starlings feeding on earthworms at a sewage treatment plant.

The earthworms were chock full of endocrine disruptors -- chemicals that mimic estrogen, a potent female sex hormone, and have been show to affect the behavior and development of exposed organisms.

The phenomenon has been most extensively -- and graphically -- chronicled in fish, with rates of male hermaphroditism reaching 100 percent in especially polluted waters. However, little research has been conducted on the environmental effects of endocrine disruptors in terrestrial animals, and the latest study suggests that those effects could be profound.

Male starlings with the highest levels of endocrine disruptors in their bodies also possessed unusually developed high vocal centers, an area of the brain associated with songbirds' songs. Scientists have previously shown that estrogen drives HVC development; its mimics apparently have the same effect.

Accordingly, the polluted male starlings sang songs of exceptional length and complexity -- a birdsign of reproductive fitness. Female starlings preferred their songs to those of unexposed males, suggesting that the polluted birds could have a reproductive advantage, eventually spreading their genes through starling populations.

But what if that exposure also damages the birds' DNA? Endocrine disruptors have been shown to tweak sperm in other species -- and if this turns out to be damaging, starling populations will suffer.

More research is needed to show whether that's is happening -- but even if the study doesn't draw firm conclusions, it raises troubling questions. After all, it's not just starlings that are exposed to endocrine disruptors: people are, too.Pollutants Increase Song Complexity and the Volume of the Brain Area HVC in a Songbird  [PLoS ONE]

Last update : 29-02-2008 10:49