Frogs Thrive in Farm Country While Anti-Atrazine Activist Scientist Tyrone Hayes Sits on Evidence

By Alex Avery | Director of Research, Center for Global Food Issues

As winter fades, farmers delight in hearing the familiar croaking noises of the frogs–it is a harbinger of spring. Activist Scientist Tyrone Hayes has long claimed that atrazine is castrating frogs, turning boy frogs into girl frogs and wiping out amphibians as we know them. While environmental activists have promoted Dr. Hayes as a frog prophet, even EPA hasn’t bought into his junk science claims. All the while, farmers continue to marvel at the abundance of frogs on their farms where atrazine is used to control weeds. It turns out, the farmers are right. Atrazine is not hurting the frogs. It turns out that Dr. Hayes knew this too, but kept the facts quiet while he conducted a campaign against atrazine. Here is the article:

Frog-pocalyse Not: Amphibians and Atrazine

An herbicide popular with farmers but targeted by environmentalists because it is supposedly responsible for chemically castrating frogs has been absolved of the crime. A paper published in October in the Public Library of Science One (PLOS One) reveals that frogs are thriving in America’s agricultural heartland. More explosively, it shows that the researcher who pushed hardest for a ban of the herbicide called Atrazine, sat on the exculpatory data for a decade while high-stakes regulatory battles raged at the state and federal level.

An herbicide popular with farmers but targeted by environmentalists because it is supposedly responsible for chemically castrating frogs has been absolved of the crime. A paper published in October in the Public Library of Science One (PLOS One) reveals that frogs are thriving in America’s agricultural heartland. More explosively, it shows that the researcher who pushed hardest for a ban of the herbicide called Atrazine, sat on the exculpatory data for a decade while high-stakes regulatory battles raged at the state and federal level.
Dr. Tyrone Hayes burst onto the national and international scene in early 2002 with research published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) claiming that “amphibian species exposed to atrazine in the wild could be at risk of impaired sexual development” and that atrazine “may be a factor in global amphibian declines.”

Ever since, Dr. Hayes has played a central role in a long-running drama over the safety of atrazine, first used widely as a farm weed killer in the 1950s. Until Hayes’ laboratory research, no studies had found significant health or environmental concerns over atrazine and its use, even among farm workers. Over the next decade, Hayes and his group published several high-profile papers questioning the environmental safety of atrazine, such as a March, 2010 paper published in PNAS where Hayes again highlighted “the role that atrazine and other endocrine-disrupting pesticides likely play in global amphibian declines.”

By the mid- to late-2000s, state and federal regulators were re-examining the available scientific evidence, funding new research, and deliberating restrictions on atrazine use amid environmental activist calls for outright bans. Essentially all of the controversy was based on laboratory findings from Dr. Hayes’ group at UC Berkeley.