Waters near croplands impair frogs’ immunity

From Virginia Beach, Va., at a meeting of the American Physiological Society

Pesticide-containing waters leave frogs more susceptible to fungal infections than pristine environments do, new field data suggest.

Tyrone Hayes and his collaborators at the University of California, Berkeley located tadpoles of Rana aurora, a protected frog species, at three sites in California. One site was upstream of any farm and had a comfortable water depth for tadpoles, about 2 feet.