Mercury Exposure Linked to Homosexuality: Contaminated Birds Exhibit Unusual Same-Sex Behavior
- Mercury Exposure Linked to Homosexuality: Contaminated Birds Exhibit Unusual Same-Sex Behavior
by Ethan A. Huff, http://www.naturalnews.com/
(NaturalNews) An international duo of scientists may have uncovered a causative factor in homosexuality: mercury poisoning. Publishing their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the team from the University of Florida and the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka observed that white ibises birds exposed to mercury tend towards unusual same-sex behavior not evident among their non-exposed counterparts.
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White ibises, a prominent feature of the Florida Everglades, feed from waters where mercury contamination is heavy. This is the direct result of many decades’ worth of contamination from industrial pollution. These birds are regularly exposed to mercury through their meals, and it seems that this mercury exposure is leading to a phenomenon that’s changing the way they pair up, live their lives and even mate.
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These “male-male pairs did everything that a heterosexual pair would do,” stated Peter Frederick, one of the study’s leads and a wildlife ecologist from the University of Florida in Gainesville, to National Geographic. “They built their nest, copulated together, stayed together on a nest for a month, even though there were no eggs — they did the whole nine yards.”
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Mercury exposure made ibises either gay or unable to reproduce at a healthy rate
For their research, Frederick and his colleague Nilmini Jayasena divided 160 young captive white ibises into four groups with equal numbers of both males and females. Three of the groups were designated as mercury groups, and were fed either low, medium or high amounts of mercury via their feed beginning at around 90 days of age. The fourth group, designated as the control, was fed a mercury-free diet.
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By the time the birds reached one year of age, Frederick and Jayasena noted that homosexual pairing had increased in all three of the mercury groups compared to the control group. Consequently, reproduction rates in the mercury groups also dropped by between 13 and 15 percent, according to the study, while mating and reproduction rates remained stable in the control group.
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Not all of the exposed ibises participated in homosexual pairing. Of the ibises that engaged in heterosexual pairing in the mercury groups, the females reportedly birthed 35 percent fewer babies, implicating mercury as a reproduction inhibitor.
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“Mercury is a known endocrine disruptor — a substance that mimics or blocks the production of natural estrogen,” writes Christine Dell’Amore for National Geographic News. “In this case, exposed male birds’ bodies produced more estrogen than testosterone as compared with control birds.”
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The full paper is available here:
RSPB.RoyalSocietyPublishing.org
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read more.
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