Male fish producing eggs????

[Cane Pole]

Anyone heard of/ or has information about this? I have read a couple of articles about this happening with smallmouth bass. What I have read is that is is not just an isolated incident, but is spread across the country. Would like to know more.

Cane Pole

[fatboy]

I did in fact hear of this over the television about male bass having fertile eggs inside of them, even though i don't rememeber the location or anything. Sorry, i couldn't have helped more. I do remember it being some type of study.

[crappieken]

Anyone heard of/ or has information about this? I have read a couple of articles about this happening with smallmouth bass. What I have read is that is is not just an isolated incident, but is spread across the country. Would like to know more.

Cane Pole

Cane Pole - I just read about this for the first time today in the Peoria, Illinois paper. Jeff Lampe, outdoor writer, reported male smallmouth bass producing eggs in the South Branch of the Potomac River in West Virginia. He states that the Washington Post reports possible causes for egg-bearing males could be chicken estrogen from poultry manure or possibly human hormones dumped into the river along with treated sewage.

[Moose1am]

I would like to see more information on that. Even with harmon's it would be hard for a male fish to grow overies and produce eggs. I am thinking that maybe they had female bass and just thought they were males. I have not read the study and this is the very first that I have heard about this. But you never know. I too would like to see more on this subject. But I would like to hear what some scientist have to say about this first.


God only knows what is dumped in our rivers these days.

Anyone heard of/ or has information about this? I have read a couple of articles about this happening with smallmouth bass. What I have read is that is is not just an isolated incident, but is spread across the country. Would like to know more.

Cane Pole

[Barnacle Bill]

Here is an article on it:
http://www.google.com/search?q=bass+...&start=10&sa=N

Second article down

[Big Zig]

Scientists say it's still too early to tell what these findings will mean for the bass population in the South Branch; they aren't sure whether the affected males are still able to reproduce.

Ok, here we go again - these people are scientists right? And it's too early to tell............

The situation in West Virginia was discovered by accident, when scientists from the state and the geological survey were called in to investigate reports that fish in the South Branch were developing lesions and dying en masse.

It's too early to tell what these findings mean for the bass population........ummmmm...........they're dead, what the heck do they think it means? I don't think the infected males will be able to reproduce, and if they do - we have a real problem that I'm not stickin around for!

ssected dozens of bass caught last summer, mainly smallmouth bass. They found no obvious cause for the lesions or deaths, but did discover that 42 percent of the male bass had developed eggs inside their sex organs.

Wonder if the rocket scientists made sure these eggs in the sex organs weren't from a parasite using the bass' sex organs (which are accessible from a water born parasite) as a host. How did they determine the eggs were actually from the bass themselves?

Sorry, I'm with Moose on this one - just doesn't go down that way.

[Roberta]

Amphibians will sometimes change gender if there's a large difference between populations of the two the sexes. I've heard of bass doing that, too, but don't know if it's just myth. Aren't amphibians higher up the evolutionary ladder?

Anyway, among all the other garbage we need to worry about in the food chain, herbicides mimic estrogen and can really foul up sperm production in mammals, so why not fish? That bit of info I got from the EPA agent testing our well (for a toxic spill upstream) after I complained about low fertility rates among our hounds. - Roberta

[Moose1am]

When I first saw this thread I was thinking "What the heck". But that was before I read the article in the link that someone gave above. I finally went to the article in the Washington Post and read the article in full.

It seems that these guys are from the United Stated Geological Society our (USGS). USGS employes all types of scientist but mostly geologists.

Now they are talking about how hard it is to actually find different types of chemicals. There are basic parameters that USEPA United States Environment Protection Agency sets standard for and that the States test for in our rivers and lakes. Things such as Nitrates, Bacteria, Phospates, Chlorides, Sulfates, Dissolved Oxygen, Temperature, Conductivity, Biological Oxygen Demand, Chemical Oxygen Demand, Total Chloride, Chlorides, Fluorides, pH, Hardness, Alkalinity, Acidity and a whole host of Inorganic chemicals. We do some TOC TDS TSS and a few other phycial parameters to book. But there are hundreds of ORGANIC chemical that are never tested for routinely. TOC is called Total Organic Carbon. Organic compounds always have carbon atoms in them and hydrogen atoms in them. So we can test for TOC by testing for the carbon atoms in the molecules. Now this does not give us what organic chemicals are present as that requires much different analysis. Equipment that is required to test for Organic is Gas Chromatgraph with mass Spec, HPLC or high pressure liquid chromatography, or just plain old liquid Chromatography. These tests are very expensive and time consuming to do so they are not conducted routinely. If you find high levels of TOC then that means that there are some organic pollutant present. From there the USEPA or the States would look at the permits of the varous sources that are dumping effluent waste into the river and they would try to figure out what is being dumped and which organics they need to test for. As you can soon realize there are hundreds of factories and small business that have storm water runoff or industrial waste that they dump in to the sewers. The sewage treament plant does not really destroy a lot of this waste. Heavey metals pass right though the plant. Organic also pass though the plant. About the only thing that is destroyed in the organic human waste that is broken down by the bacteria in the sewage treatment plant. The bacteria consume the **** and then they themselves are filted out of the water and returned to the system as much as possible. The effulenet is then treated with cholorine compounds that kills the pathogenic bacteria in the water before the water is dumped back into the river.

It's a know fact that you can give human females testosterone harmones and they will develop male sex characterists such as facial hair and deeper voices. If you give a male human estrogen he will develop breasts. So it's possible that some kind of organic compound could be dumped into the river that caused those male fish to develop female organs and to produce eggs. It's hard to believe but I have seen the effects of Testosterone on baby chickens that were just a few days old. Back when I was taking Advanced Biology in High School we took testosterone and injected it into the baby chicks and within a few day they started to grow waddles and crests and were getting up on things in their cages and started to crow like a adult rooster. Testosterone is a very powerful hormone and it can produce some intresting results. I would suspect that the female hormone estrogen and progesteron would also produce similar results only toward the female spectrum. It could be that females taking hormones are passing those hormones though their body and into the waste stream of the sewage treatment plant and out into the river. Only more testing will confirm this but it's like looking for a needle in the hay stack. First they need to know that chemical to test for. They can't set up the proper testing procedure until they know what to test for. It's like one of those which came first the chicken or the egg deals. Only some good detective work and some money for research will help figure out what is causing this problem.

I now belive that it's real and hope they figure out what is going on soon.

You think that testing the water is hard you should read up on the regulations that deal with testing the air for Air Toxics. Anyone that runs a big factory or power plant or refinery has to deal with those and the rules are not even written yet even though Congress in the Clean Air Act Admendments of 1990 charged the USEPA with that task. USEPA is way behind schedule in making the rules that need to be enforced to clean up the air. Mercury is one of the things that is tested in water but not yet in our air. Hopefully soon the USEPA will promulegate some new mercury emission rules and limites on the smoke stacks.

Ok, here we go again - these people are scientists right? And it's too early to tell............



It's too early to tell what these findings mean for the bass population........ummmmm...........they're dead, what the heck do they think it means? I don't think the infected males will be able to reproduce, and if they do - we have a real problem that I'm not stickin around for!



Wonder if the rocket scientists made sure these eggs in the sex organs weren't from a parasite using the bass' sex organs (which are accessible from a water born parasite) as a host. How did they determine the eggs were actually from the bass themselves?

Sorry, I'm with Moose on this one - just doesn't go down that way.

[Roberta]

Moose- Doug and I recently took a stream monitoring class with an agent from OSU. Besides doing on-site checks for macroinvertebrates, we were also taught how to do tests for dissolved oxygen, nitrates, etc.

It was stressed how important it is for buffer areas to be maintained long streambeds as the riparian buffer filters out many of the pollutants that enter the stream at various points. In this area, farm run off is a big problem, because farmers have installed field drains on a larger scale than ever before. They've torn out the riparian buffers and channelized streams in effort to drain their fields more quickly. As a result, herbicides, insecticides and fertilizer (both petro-chemical and organic) race downstream and enter lakes, reservoirs and larger streams. Add that to the industrial pollutants, wastewater treatment effluent and runoff from parking lots and manicured lawns, and it's a wonder fish don't have two heads. - Roberta