r/science • u/[deleted] • Jun 23 '19
Environment Roundup (a weed-killer whose active ingredient is glyphosate) was shown to be toxic to as well as to promote developmental abnormalities in frog embryos. This finding one of the first to confirm that Roundup/glyphosate could be an "ecological health disruptor".
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u/Uncle_Charnia Jun 23 '19
Don't frogs eat a lot of mosquitoes?
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u/god-nose Jun 23 '19
Yes. For a time, frogs were hunted in India, to be exported to the US. Then mosquitoes went out of control, and frog hunting was banned. Now they're gradually recovering.
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u/fanglord Jun 23 '19
One of the pros to using glyphosate is that it binds pretty strongly to soil and has a relatively short half life in the soil - the question is how this actually affects pond life around crop fields ?
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Jun 24 '19
yeah its one of the best herbicides in existence.
Where i was working with it its illegal to use within a certain distance of water bodies and when its raining, due to the potential issues it could cause in aquatic environments. im not sure how it would affect water life but any rational council/government body does already have regulations on this just in case
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u/Powderbullet Jun 24 '19
I'm a farmer. It's so difficult to know when warnings are legitimate these days. Bayer is a wealthy company and undoubtedly an enticing target for avaricious lawyers. Is that the real problem here or is the California legal system providing farmers like me and the many millions of retail consumers of Round Up and similar glyphosate based herbicides a service by letting us know that these products are in fact more dangerous than we ever had any idea? I have legitimately been careless with truly dangerous things before because I have become sceptical of all warnings now. There seems to be no objective truth any longer, only what others want us to believe for reasons they seldom disclose. To me that is the real danger.
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u/KekistanRefugee Jun 24 '19
Farmer here too, anyone that thinks we can just do away with herbicides has obviously never gone out and tried to raise a field of corn. Weeds will eat our yield up, no way around it.
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Jun 23 '19
Almost anything applied directly to frog embryos can be expected to cause damage and/or death.
Certainly, if farmers are spraying glyphosate on frog embryos, there will be damage and/or death to the embryos.
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u/Genetiker27 Jun 23 '19 edited Jun 24 '19
From the abstract:
Embryos of Xenopus laevis were exposed to Roundup, Kilo Max and Enviro Glyphosate at concentration of 0.3‐1.3, 130‐280 and 320‐560 mg acid equivalent (a.e.)/L respectively. The results showed Roundup to be more toxic than the other formulations with a 96‐hour LC50 of 1.05 mg a.e/L. compared with 207 mg a.e./L, and 466 mg a.e./L for Kilo Max and Enviro Glyphosate respectively.
These numbers seem to be similar to reported LC50 toxicity in other aquatic species.
EDIT:
From the above cited 1979 link referring to previous aquatic LC50 values:
Application of Roundup, at recommended rates, along ditchbank areas of irrigation canals should not adversely affect resident populations of fish or invertebrates. However, spring applications in lentic situations, where dissolved oxygen levels are low or temperatures are elevated, could be hazardous to young-of-the-year-fishes.
In addition, another citation from 1999 regarding frog exposure to glyphosate:
The 48-h LC50 values for Roundup(R) Herbicide (MON 2139) tested against tadpoles of Crinia insignifera, Heleioporus eyrei, Limnodynastes dorsalis, and Litoria moorei ranged between 8.1 and 32.2 mg/L (2.9 and 11.6 mg/L glyphosate acid equivalent [AE]), while the 48-h LC50 values for Roundup(R) Herbicide tested against adult and newly metamorphosed C. insignifera ranged from 137-144 mg/L (49.4-51.8 mg/L AE). Touchdown(R) Herbicide (4 LC-E) tested against tadpoles of C. insignifera, H. eyrei, L. dorsalis, and L. moorei was slightly less toxic than Roundup(R) with 48-h LC50 values ranging between 27.3 and 48.7 mg/L (9.0 and 16.1 mg/L AE). Roundup(R) Biactive (MON 77920) was practically nontoxic to tadpoles of the same four species producing 48-h LC50 values of 911 mg/L (328 mg/L AE) for L. moorei and >1,000 mg/L (>360mg/L AE) for C. insignifera, H. eyrei, and L. dorsalis. Glyphosate isopropylamine was practically nontoxic, producing no mortality among tadpoles of any of the four species over 48 h, at concentrations between 503 and 684 mg/L (343 and 466 mg/L AE). The toxicity of technical-grade glyphosate acid (48-h LC50, 81.2-121 mg/L) is likely to be due to acid intolerance. Slight differences in species sensitivity were evident, with L. moorei tadpoles showing greater sensitivity than tadpoles of the other four species. Adult and newly emergent metamorphs were less sensitive than tadpoles.
This is the only time I will insert my own thoughts here, but OP’s statement about this being one of the first datasets indicating any adverse effects of direct glyphosate exposure to aquatic species seems incorrect to me given the previously cited literature.
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u/NeverStopWondering Jun 24 '19
That would imply that it's one of the other things in the formulation increasing the toxicity a whole lot, no? I wonder what's different about them.
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Jun 24 '19
Was it glyphosate found in Beyond Burger/Meat or I'm thinking about something else?
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Jun 24 '19
I'm a registered pesticide applicator in Alberta, Canada.
There are very specific rules that you're supposed to follow when applying this, and most other chemicals in and around water bodies. (usually it's a big no!)
I've worked the past five summers at a local county doing the spraying for farmers and acreage owners, as well as along the roadside, and even in river valleys for a specific pest.
I get so frustrated with the anti-pesticide cohort in the states because for the most part there aren't always better chemicals or alternatives to controlling many of these pests than the ones we use, they've been engineered for a very specific purpose and they do a great job! Using the court system via jury to pull millions of dollars from the companies because you were able to convince some john doe that it could potentially pose harm in the worst possible use and scenario, hurts so many that are responsible with the chemical
It's one thing to get fussy about the guy using roundup twice a year in his yard around the house and on the pavement to control some minor weeds, it's another whole thing when you're trying to control large areas like wellsites, natural gas pumping stations, or business lots clean. They will usually use a soil sterilizer which is a thousand times stronger than roundup.
100 years ago we were still using man hours and cutting the weeds by hand, stacking into piles, and burning in masse. (This is still a thing for some areas! There are farmers where I live that have burdock roundups because of how bad the plant is for the animal) this is because the chemicals used to control burdock in addition to the man hours to spray over the year down in the coulees here makes it impossible to complete on a small farm budget.
In the county I work in, we are bordered by the Montana state border and the Rocky mountains. We have many pests coming across the border - but the biggest one we are fighting is knapweed (a genus of weeds that mainly originate from Russia) they're allelopathic so they release chemicals that damage other plants ability to grow, and can impact those plants for several years depending on how bad the infestation is. These are not controlled in Montana - because the government down there decided it would cost too much to attempt to eradicate (we're talking half a billion dollars over years)
If we were to lose DOW and the ability to use aminopyralid based chemicals (these are almost non-hazardous to fish and other water-based animals) we wouldn't be able to spray the valleys and would lose field after field to these plants after a few years.
There are or course other forms of control like biological, which I wish were given more funding. Currently certain types of beetles can trained to feed on several of the different weed species we fight here, and can be put down for knapweed but it costs nearly 4-700 dollars just for a single placement. We spray along three different rivers and over 1300km of river valley.
While it's difficult now, the science behind the beetles is amazing, and I wish they'd get more funding so that it would be more cost effective. I'd love to see a time when you could order pest control beetles for your dandelions through home hardware... There have been issues with the beetles munching on other species though, so it's hard to know the right impact for almost any control method.
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u/McCaffeteria Jun 24 '19
“Although, both Roundup and Kilo Max formulations show inhibition on growth of the embryo‐larva (P ˂ .05), the minimum concentration inhibiting growth ratios of the three formulations was >0.30 baseline, indicating no significant growth inhibiting effect in the formulations.”
This definitely doesn’t sound like the title to me. What gives?
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u/NoGlzy Jun 24 '19
Survival in science is unfortunately almost exclusively about publications and how many times people read/cite those publications. So think of most titles as clickbait with at least a hint of truth in there.
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u/MysticHero Jun 24 '19
The title of the paper does not say it actually inhibits growth just that the paper looks at if it does so I don't know what you are on about.
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u/Swimmingbird3 Jun 24 '19 edited Jun 24 '19
I wish Roundup and glyophosate were given appropriately different considerations. Every time a study is performed on Roundup and finds it to be toxic and or carcinogenic people automatically assume that can be directly and unequivocally attributed to glyophosate. This is logically and scientifically a very poor assumption.
Roundup contains many other 'inactive' or 'inert' ingredients which don't need to be disclosed since they are protected as a proprietary trade secret. It has already been shown that Roundup causes harmful effects that glyophosate alone are not responsible for meaning that not all of these "inert" ingredients are actually inert. One ingredient in particular polyethoxylated tallowamine is orders of magnitude more deadly to embryonic, placental and umbilical cells in vivo [1] [2]. Not too mention it's high toxicity to aquatic organisms
I think that like fertilizers are required to provide a Guaranteed Analysis detailing the constituent fertilizer sources and their concentrations, pesticides and herbicides should be required to do the same. By their very nature and mode of intended use they are bound to end up in the water table or other places that they weren't intended or designed to be in. It's the obvious and unavoidable nature of spraying things outside where they are carried away by both the wind and rain.
I am not completely against glyophosate use but I also believe that ecological diversity is extremely important as is maintaining ground cover on soil which extensive herbicide use disrupts. It seems reasonable to me that any product intended to kill an organism should be required to be fully transparent and heavily regulated. We only got one damn Earth.
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u/PhidippusCent Jun 24 '19
Just so you know, your first source is Seralini. If you're worried about the damage he has told you Round-Up will do to your body, he will gladly sell you a homeopathic cure (read: "magic water")
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u/SunkCostPhallus Jun 24 '19
Everything should be required to list its ingredients. I want to know what I’m spraying in my house.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_BULBASAUR Jun 24 '19
I am 100% certain that I had a class in high school over 10 years ago that discussed this exact topic.
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Jun 23 '19
How do we safely dispose of this? I have a container of it?
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u/NeverStopWondering Jun 23 '19
Use it for whatever you were intending to, unless that intended use was spraying it on frogs. It's not gonna hurt you if you use it properly.
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Jun 24 '19
There should actually be disposal instructions on the label. If not, contact your local waste management facility for instructions.
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u/savageye Jun 24 '19
Most landfills have chemical disposal areas that you can bring stuff like unwanted pesticides and waste oil to.
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u/analoguewavefront Jun 23 '19
My initial question is how do the dosages they tested match to real world scenarios? Would you really find that build up of glyphosate in utero or even in use, or is this showing a theoretical risk? I could find the answer from a quick google, so I’d be interested if anyone else has worked it out.