Ask Lemmy

Well looking for more reasons to worry, you are in for a treat(s)! The main problem is pollution, especially endocrine disruptors, chemicals that play on the receptors that steroids work on. A main source of them is herbicides, atrazine for instance, the second most popular herbicide, is one, and in concentrations as low as around 6 or so parts per billion makes the frogs sterile, and hermathroditic. That is one of many, but it's widespread, in independeant testing of water it's found in near all municipal water systems, to say nothing of ponds and wetlands with houses and business and farms bordering them. Or even roads as they will spray herbicides everywhere there is no thought given to minimizing use. Any concern expressed is met with contempt, and industry pressure to label the concerned as a deluded crank. Despite irrefutable evidence of the harms.

Reality has lost to monied interests, the public no longer is ruled by reality by and large, only fighting a rearguard and guerilla actions. Corporate interests have their own mercenary science outfits that start backwards from the conclusion and design studies to get there, science journals and media to publish it, and question independant reality based studies, lobbyists, and lawmakers themselves to put their names on model legislation those corporations write for them, simply filling in the blanks and boom, 1,000 pages of legislation. Then the other lawmakers add riders on unrelated pet issues they couldn't pass otherwise because they are unpopular bullshit, and boom, new laws. Or pressure on regulators, and whatever else.

Back to the frogs in particular, there is also a fungal infection they first noticed in south america that is spreading worldwide killing them. Often weakened by the chemial pollution to, all amphibians are more vulnerable to pollution. Insects likely are too. In the 90s after a drive on a summer night, the entire car would be covered in bug splatters, you would have to use windshield wipers and fluid to see several times even. Now there are a handful of splatters if that. I don't remember exactly when they disappeared en masse, except for 1996 and 1997 I saw massive hatches, fireflies covering fields, mayflies so thick on the ground it looked like snow, and never again to that degree. Something around that time, 1998, happened. The swamp behind my house was a cacophany of frogs in 97 and before, and after was silent as well. This is in the country too, not in the city, or particularly near farmland. Mosquitoes got worse too. Frogs eat the larvae as tadpoles and the insects as adults. They are important.

But Mother Jones did a couple of articles on the scientist who proved the atrazine hermathrodizing frogs link, Syngenta, evil swiss company, probably connected to nazi money, went after him personally, cancelled his funding, tried to get his girl to leave him, all sorts of stuff. Tyrone Hayes there wasn't one to back down to bullies though, it's a good story and there is a follow up, The Frog of War. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/02/tyrone-hayes-atrazine-syngenta-feud-frog-endangered/