These findings are coming from a United States geological survey, in the first comprehensive examination that has been done on intersex fish throughout America, a problem that is said to be linked to birth control pills and a number of other hormone treatments which are seeping into rivers. There have been sporadic reports of fish being feminized for a number of years now.

The agency is looking at past data coming from nine different river basins, covering approximately two thirds worth of the country, and they found that approximately six percent of the 1,500 total male fish had a little bit of female inside of them. They looked at at least 16 different species, and most were not effective.

But the fish that were the most feminized happened to be two of the most desired sporting fish, the large mouth and the small mouth freshwater bass, fish that belong to the black bass fish family. Both of those species were also the ones that were the most examined out of all of the fish subjects, with approximately 500 different black bass having been tallied.

According to Jo Ellen Hinck, a USGS biologist, this is becoming a widespread problem. She is the leading author on this study, which was published in Aquatic Toxicology this month. She said that 44 percent of all of the sites where the black bass per tested had one or more males that had egg cells that were growing inside of them.

There have been past studies that linked this problem to hormones responsible for disrupting the endocrine system, such as the estrogen that comes from medicines indicated for women. While the fish are still capable of reproducing, studies are showing that they simply are not reproducing as well.

Intersex fish problems are also being seen as being a general warning to what is being seen as a much larger problem: The effect that endocrine disruptors have on the entire environment as a whole.

These egg cells that are growing in the gonads of the male fish are only capable of being seen using a microscope once the fish had been dissected. The study has been using data from between 1995 and 2004, which is when the government decided to stop funding the research. It seems that the only river basin that was examined that did not show a problem was the Yukon River Basin in Alaska.

Hinck has said that black bass definitely seem to be a lot more prone to this problem, but researchers are not sure why this is.

Photo Credits: rezsox

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