I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Organs Zone. It has scientists studying health and disease in various parts  of our bodies. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
It’s has been long suspected that pollution in the environment can affect the fertility of certain species and some studies have shown a positive correlation (a link but not a cause!)
There have been reports of abnormal animals being born along river ways in developing countries where the environmental guidelines for polluted waste are not strictly regulated.
If these wastes are toxic to biological organisms then it is likely they will affect reproduction of organisms especially since the process involves cell division and replication genetic instructions. If there is an error in the instructions being read and interpreted this can affect the development of offspring and later generations too.
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Good answer! Mel!
There’s lots of great research going on in this area too, johnfowla!
We are lucky enough that it’s not so much if a problem here, but contaminated waterways are a huge problem in Europe for example!
I have a friend working in this very area n she takes fish from contaminated rivers in France and looks at them in the lab. She also takes the contaminated water and tries to identify what is harmful in it!
She has found that there are some types of pesticides (used on the fruit and veggies we et, which is a worry) that can change the sexual characteristics of fish ( making girl fish more like boys and boy fish more like girls) which is very harmful to reproduction!
If you’d like more information, im very happy to talk more about this! It’s a ver exciting and imoortant area of research!
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Great question.
And I’m sure you’ve heard that it does affect reproduction.
We call the release/ spill of waste products from things we humans use, pollutants. A good example is radioactive waste from power plants. This and other types of biological waste are not earth friendly nor biodegradable as they take a long time to break down to something safe. If they come in contact with any species/ life, they negatively affect that species and can also affect their ability to reproduce.
Hope that makes sense 😀
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I worked on this a bit…in fish. Some of the pollution that gets into our waterways (even here in clean Australia) contains hormones. These hormones can cause problems in other species. They can cause fish to change sex, or to be both sexes at once. They especially affect frogs (frogs are very sensitive to environmental changes). Obviously, flipping sexes or being both male and female at the same time wreaks havoc on reproduction! Very weird stuff…
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Many animals reproduce using sperm and eggs. These contain half the DNA each so when the egg and sperm fuse a new organism is created. However, it also means that if a mutation (accidental change in the DNA) occurs in either the sperm or the egg, that mutation will be transferred to the next generation.
Why is this important to your question I hear you ask!
Well, many pollutants contain so-called ‘mutagenic’ chemicals (chemicals which produce mutations in DNA). Most people know that radioactive waste is mutagenic and this is a huge problem for Japan at the moment after the nuclear reactor meltdown last year.
However, many people may not know that mutagens are also present in the air. Scientists test for the presence of mutagens in the air using bacteria which quickly reproduce. That means that they can see the mutations building up in the bacteria colonies quickly and can test the rates of mutation when they put the bacteria in different environments with more or less pollution.
So yes, even the everyday air pollution can cause mutations which are passed on to offspring. While not all mutations are bad, I don’t think air pollution is going to turn us into X-men any time soon.
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