Diverse sources for endocrine disruption in the wild

ABSTRACT

We are increasingly realizing that diverse human activities are associated with endocrine disruption in wildlife populations. Most field research on endocrine disruption tends to narrowly target particular endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and contaminant sources as the dominant culprit of observed endocrine disruption. Recently, we and our colleagues assessed patterns of endocrine disruption in metamorphosing frogs in ponds along a forest-suburban land use gradient. In conjunction, we assayed for a diversity of putative of EDCs from an array of possible sources. We found that endocrine disruption in suburban frog populations was associated with a cocktail of different EDCs including classical estrogens, phytoestrogens, and metalloestrogens. These results indicate that endocrine disruption in suburban frogs is likely to be the product of multiple chemicals and sources. Our findings have implications for other systems where endocrine disruption is attributed to a limited set of contaminants or sources without necessarily exploring the contributions of other EDC pathways. Here, we discuss our findings in the context of other field endocrine disruption research and encourage future studies to assess the broader EDC landscape which may be impacting wildlife populations.

KEYWORDS:

• Estrogen
• frog
• land use gradient
• metalloestrogen
• phytoestrogen
• suburban

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interests

No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.

Acknowledgments

Discussions with colleagues including L. Barber, G. Giller, and A. Vajda contributed to our thinking about sources of endocrine disruptors. Fig. 1 was designed using freely-available vector images from the Integration and Application Network (IAN) at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES).