Ever since her 1962 book "Silent Spring", chemicals and pollution have been hard-wired into the American conciousness as inherently evil. The widespread "discovery" of frogs and toads around the globe with anatomical deformities such as multiple legs or missing legs during the 1980's and 1990's led many scientists to conclude that these resulted either from chemical pollution, Man-Made Ozon Layer Thinning (resulting in increased UV-B irradiation), or a combination of the two. Others viewed parasites as a potential issue.
Actually, mainstream "scientists" never even considered other possibilities.
"Deformed frogs became one of the most contentious environmental issues of all time, with the parasite researchers on one side, and the 'chemical company' as I call them, on the other," says Stanley Sessions, an amphibian specialist and professor of biology at Hartwick College, in Oneonta, New York.
"There was a veritable media firestorm, with millions of dollars of grant money at stake."
This, of course, explains why other possibilities were not considered.
After a long period of research, Sessions and other researchers established that many amphibians with extra limbs were actually infected by small parasitic flatworms called Riberoria trematodes.
These creatures burrow into the hindquarters of tadpoles where they physically rearrange the limb bud cells and thereby interfere with limb development.
As for those missing legs? Dragonfly nymphs.
Crucially though, the nymphs rarely ate the tadpoles whole. More often than not, they would grab the tadpole and chew at a hind limb, often removing it altogether.
"Once they grab the tadpole, they use their front legs to turn it around, searching for the tender bits, in this case the hind limb buds, which they then snip off with their mandibles," says Sessions.
"Are parasites sufficient to cause extra limbs?," he asks. "Yes. Is selective predation by dragonfly nymphs sufficient to cause loss or reduction of limbs. Yes. Are chemical pollutants necessary to understand either of these phenomena? No."
Well. How embarassing. After all, as AlGore is so fond of claiming, The Science Was In. Clearly, something humans were doing to the environment was causing these anomalies, and therefore, millions of dollars in grant funding were made available to those "scientists" who chose to pursue "research" likely to demonstrate this causal relationship. Naturally, the actual underlying causes were determined by folks who weren't part of the Gravy Train.
Do you imagine that your Congressman or Senator is even aware of - much less understands - the ramifications? Or will they just blindly vote in "Cap and Trade" or other stupid things in an effort to show that they want to "Save The Planet"?
