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Eco-,from the Greek word for house, and -logy, a suffix meaning “the study of,” combine to form the word ecology. Ecology is a branch of science concerned with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments. Scientists have discovered some startling facts about how one organism is responding to chemicals we’ve introduced into the ecosphere.
The following article from Discover magazine, titled “Transsexual Frogs,” reveals how a weed killer changed male frogs’ reproductive systems, causing them to grow ovaries. The discovery of this hermaphroditic condition may explain why frogs are disappearing. Read the first page of the article and then follow the directions for the activity that follows. NOTE: The numbers that appear in the article relate to the activity that follows.
Source: Northern Leopard Frog, BuBZ, Wikimedia Commons
A leopard frog destined for testing at the University of California at Berkeley. Endocrinologist Tyrone Hayes keeps 3,000 such frogs in his basement laboratory. Many of them have had sex problems due to the effects of the chemical atrazine.
Transsexual Frogs
A popular weed killer makes some frogs grow the wrong sex organs. Your drinking water may have 30 times the dose they’re getting.
by Elizabeth Royte, Catherine Ledner
From the February 2003 issue of Discover magazine
Tyrone Hayes stands out in the overwhelmingly white field of biology, and his skin color isn’t the half of it. To use his own idiom, Hayes is several standard (1) deviations from the norm. At the University of California at Berkeley, he glides around his lab wearing nylon shorts and rubber flip-flops, with a gold hoop in one ear and his beard braided into two impish points. . . . He drives a truck littered with detritus, human, amphibian, and reptilian. . . .
Hayes, 35, is a professor at Berkeley, where his research centers on frogs. Frogs make convenient study subjects for anyone interested in how hormones affect physical development. Their (2) transformation from egg to tadpole to adult is rapid, and it’s visible to the naked eye. With their permeable skin, frogs are especially vulnerable to environmental factors such as solar radiation or (3) herbicides. That vulnerability has lately garnered Hayes more attention than his appearance ever has. . . .
The controversy began five years ago, when a company called Syngenta asked Hayes to run safety tests on its product atrazine. Syngenta is the world’s largest agribusiness company, with $6.3 billion in sales of crop-related chemicals and other products in 2001 alone. Atrazine is the most widely used weed killer in the United States.To test its safety, Hayes put trace amounts of the compound in the water tanks in which he raised African clawed frogs. When the frogs were fully grown, they appeared normal. But when Hayes looked closer, he found problems. Some male frogs had developed multiple sex organs, and some had both ovaries and testes. There were also males with shrunken larynxes, a crippling handicap for a frog intent on mating. The atrazine apparently created hermaphrodites at a concentration one-thirtieth the safe level set by the Environmental Protection Agency for drinking water. . . .
To find out if frogs in the wild showed hermaphroditism, Hayes (4) dissected juveniles from numerous sites. To see if frogs were vulnerable as adults, and if the effects were (5) reversible, he exposed them to atrazine at different stages of their development.
Hayes published his first set of findings last April, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He published the second set in October, in Nature. The two studies showed equally dramatic results: 40 percent of male frogs were feminized; 80 percent had diminished larynxes. Wild frogs collected from areas with atrazine showed the same number of (6) abnormalities. Could the chemical also affect humans? The beginning of an answer may be emerging. Workers at a Louisiana plant where atrazine is manufactured are now suing their employer, saying they were nine times as likely to get prostate cancer as the average Louisianan.
Source: Context logo, Taco Hoekwater,
Wikimedia Commons
Analyzing word parts is an especially powerful strategy if you analyze the context of the word at the same time. If you’ve completed the lesson on context clues, you’ll remember this practical strategy: When you come to an unfamiliar word—one you need to know to understand the content—stop to reread the sentence containing the word. If there are no clues in that sentence, search for hints in the sentences before and after the word. When you locate a context clue, substitute your guess in place of the unfamiliar word to see if it makes sense.
Use your knowledge of word parts and context clues to determine the meaning of the numbered words in the Discover article. Let’s analyze one of the multisyllabic words as an example.
Syngenta is the world’s largest agribusiness company, with $6.3 billion in sales of crop-related chemicals and other products in 2001 alone.
In the sentence above, if I am not certain what agribusiness means, I can think of another word that begins with agri-. Agriculture means “farming.” Next I look for a context clue in the sentence and see the word crop. That confirms it. Syngenta is a business associated with farming.
Now it’s your turn. Locate each word in the passage and select the correct meaning.
Congratulations! You applied what you know about Latin and Greek affixes, and you used context clues to analyze the meaning of some of the difficult words in this interesting article.