Archives for category: Mote

At Lake Apopka in Central Florida, the alligators have tiny penises. They run a third the size of normal alligator phalli and have significantly diminished sperm counts. In England, on the Lee River, feminized male fish have eggs as well as sperm in their gonads. And in the Great Lakes region, birds – including male herring gulls, terns and bald eagles – start exhibiting hermaphroditic changes after eating feminized fish.

Some scientists think the culprit in all of these gender-bending events might be exposure to ecoestrogens – a broad class of chemicals that mimic the hormone estrogen and disrupt normal functioning of the endocrine system, a body-wide network of hormone-producing glands that control things like growth and reproduction.

Mote Magazine, 2005

The Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, spearheaded by Dr. Randall Wells, is a 35-year study of the bottlenose dolphins that live in Sarasota Bay. As the world’s longest-running dolphin study, the joint Mote Marine Laboratory and Chicago Zoological Society program has set the standard for similar studies throughout the world and shown that dolphins have wilder, more complex and intriguing lives than those of the grinning playful animals shown on TV and in the movies. “A dolphin’s smile is deceiving. It’s a fact of anatomy, not an indication of attitude. We must remember dolphins are wild animals, with complex behavioral adaptations resulting from many millions of years of evolution,” says Wells.

Mote Magazine, 2005