EPA Restricts Rodent Pesticide

  • New regulations will keep certain pesticides out of residential areas, hospitals, and daycare centers or schools.(Photo courtesy of Ordered Chaos CC-2.0)

The feds are cracking down on a pesticide linked to the deaths of two little girls. Lester Graham reports the poison is used to kill burrowing rodents.

Transcript

The feds are cracking down on a pesticide linked to the deaths of two little girls. Lester Graham reports the poison is used to kill burrowing rodents.

The Environmental Protection Agency is restricting use of the pesticide after two young girls in Utah, a four-year-old and a 15-month-old, died. Phosphine fumigants in the form of poisoned pellets had been used near their home. With this new restriction, the pesticide cannot be used in residential areas.

“It’s not okay at all.”

Marty Monell is the EPA’s Deputy Director of the Office of Pesticide Programs.

“So, there’s no residential use, no use around hospitals or daycare centers or schools.”

The one exception is on athletic fields with certain restrictions.
Those pesticides can still be used to kill bugs in grain bins and silos and for rodents on farms and orchards.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Mice Morphing at Warp Speed

  • Oliver Pergams used a tiny caliper to measure the mice, tracking changes in size over the years. (Photo by Gabriel Spitzer)

Evolution takes place over long stretches of time: millennia and epochs. But some new research shows that animals might be changing much
faster than nearly anyone thought. Gabriel Spitzer has more on those
changes, and how they seem to be linked to humans:

Transcript

Evolution takes place over long stretches of time: millennia and epochs. But some new research shows that animals might be changing much
faster than nearly anyone thought. Gabriel Spitzer has more on those
changes, and how they seem to be linked to humans:

Tall Trees Park is a little patch of green in Glenview, Illinois – a
northern suburb of Chicago. About a hundred years ago, a lot of this area
looked a lot like this. It was mostly farms and pasture and forest. And now
of course it’s a lot of strip malls and subdivisions and stuff. And the
population has grown seventyfold. The climate has changed, too. It’s
gotten a little warmer, a little wetter.

And all this has made life a lot different for the northern white-footed
mice who live here. It’s actually not just made life different for the
mice, it’s changed the mice themselves.

That gets back to a guy named Oliver Pergams. He’s an ecologist, and in
the mid-90s, he was looking at deer mice who live on the Channel Islands
off the coast of California. And he was taking these mice and comparing
them to museum samples of the same kind of mice from the same place, but
decades earlier.

“And I found something kind of strange – that the older specimens were
larger than the newer specimens, so they shrunk in size over a period of
about 30 or 40 years.”

That got him wondering if those relatively quick changes are happening in
other places. So years later, now on the faculty at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, he gathered up some of those White Footed Mice from
the Chicago suburbs. And he went to the Field Museum of Natural History…

(sound of a cabinet opening)
… where they have a hundred years of dead mouse specimens stored in
white metal cabinets.

“Here we have trays and trays of the northern white-footed mouse.”

With a tiny caliper, he’d measure their skulls, their feet, the distance
from their eyes to their noses.

“So this one here was collected by Aikley in 1903.”

And he compared mice from before and after 1950.

“Here are some skulls, this one was collected in 1989.”

Lo and behold, these mice had grown: by more than 10% on some measures.

This phenomenon goes way beyond Chicago. Pergams measured more than 1,300
rodents from four different continents – Alaskan lemmings, Mexican
gophers, Filipino rats. Some of them got bigger, some smaller. But across
the world, most of the animals have changed over time spans thought to be
mere evolutionary eyeblinks.

The next step is to figure out why.

“You can’t get in a time machine and go back and look to see what
actually happened. So the next best thing is to see if there’s
associations or correlations with big factors.”

He found the variations correlate with changes in climate and human
population density. The exact reasons aren’t clear – more people might
mean more yummy trash for the mice to eat, for example. That’s going to
take more research to figure out, and these critters might be overdue for
some extra attention.

“One of the questions is, well, why didn’t anybody notice this before?
And I think the answer is, they haven’t looked.”

Larry Heaney curates the Field Museum’s mammal collection. He says
Pergams’s research opens up new questions about how animals respond to
changes driven by humans.

“The implication is, these animals are changing very, very rapidly. So in
a sense, it’s good: they can change. But the other side of the coin is,
they’re having to change.”

Now, the question is, is this happening in other species, too? What about
birds or bugs or plants?

“There’s been this default attitude that if you go to one place and you
capture or you observe animals or plants, that essentially there’s going
to be the same animals or plants 50 years or 100 years later. I don’t
think that’s possible to assume at all. We have to include the fact of
this change in all of our decisions, from ecology to evolutionary biology
to conservation.”

Pergams’s findings show that even the most common creatures have more to
teach us – when we ask the right kinds of questions.

For The Environment Report, I’m Gabriel Spitzer.

Related Links

Hotlines for Wild Animal Rescue

  • Possums pretty much just want to be left alone – and they let you know by opening their mouths full of teeth. It’s called an alligator gape. (Photo by Patti Roman)

Let’s say you find a baby chipmunk that fell

out of a tree… or worse, you hit an animal with your car.

Who do you call? Rebecca Williams has the story of people

who feel it’s their duty to nurse these animals back to health…

and get them back to the wild:

Transcript

Let’s say you find a baby chipmunk that fell out of a tree… or worse, you hit an animal with your car. Who do you call? Rebecca Williams has the story of people who feel it’s their duty to nurse these animals back to health… and get them back to the wild:


(sound of phone ringing)


“Thank you for calling the Friends of Wildlife hotline for squirrels, chipmunks and other small rodents. If you have rescued a small animal please keep it warm and quiet…” (beep)

There are hotlines like these set up all over the country. There are bunny hotlines, woodchuck hotlines… you name it and there’s a volunteer hotline for it.

The woman who answers the Possum Hotline is Patti Roman. She volunteers in Michigan. She has a basement full of baby possums.

“Mom has 13 babies so if you get a weekend where two or three moms are hit I’ll get a lot of babies in a few days.”

She says possums get hit by cars a lot. They love to eat roadkill, and they’ll just sit there in the middle of the road, staring at your headlights.

Possums are marsupials like kangaroos. Except they don’t hop out of the way. They keep their babies in their pouches. When a mom gets hit, a lot of times the babies will survive. Someone will find the babies and call the Possum Hotline.

Patti Roman says she’s had up to a hundred baby possums in her basement at one time.

She puts gloves on before she pulls a possum out of its terrarium. I don’t know if you know possums, but they look like a huge hairy rat on its worst day. But this baby possum is kinda cute. He’s giving us a sharp-toothed little grin. It’s a I’ll-rip-your-hand off kind of grin.

“He’s doing the alligator gape right now. But he’s not biting me, but he is trying to scare me.”

That mouth full of sharp teeth is your first clue that possums just want to be left alone. If your dog chases after one, the possum might play dead. Then it’ll get up and waddle off when you’re not looking.

Patti Roman takes care of the possums until they’re a few months old. Then she takes them into the woods and lets them go. She says wildlife is always better off in the wild. But she says she does get criticized for interfering with nature.

“A possum who gets hit by a car is not supposed to die. It has nothing to do with natural selection. And if we can help I think we should.”

But some scientists debate that. Jim Harding is a wildlife specialist at Michigan State University.

“I think the majority of rehabilitation efforts is often just based on a human need to care for things. It isn’t really related to conservation unless you’re dealing with a very rare species.”

Harding says rehabbing some types of common animals can actually make things worse. For example – he says there are so many raccoons that they can wipe out a lot of birds because they eat their eggs.

But Patti Roman says she really feels like she’s doing the right thing. She spent 18 years at the Humane Society rescuing dogs and cats. But she never knew for sure those animals would be placed in good homes.

“When you call to check on the animal a year later – it’s been given away or run away or accidentally been killed. It was breaking my heart. And after awhile I thought, you know, I enjoy doing the wild animals because when they’re ready to go I’m not dependent on people anymore. It feeds my soul. It really does. I do this and I feel very, very good every morning that I can save a life.”

She says when she lets the possums go they don’t look back. They just take off into the woods. And even if that little possum ends up getting eaten by a fox, Roman says that’s okay, because at least that’s natural.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Rat Patrol

They can chew through cinderblock…tread water for days…And survive…if necessary, by just eating dog feces. But they’re not some kind of mutant superhero…they’re rats. And in cities, where rat populations can quickly explode, there’s a constant battle against the resilient rodents. Today, some cities are winning the war with some surprisingly simple solutions. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy Nelson explains: