Does feeding cattle antibiotics contribute to global warming?
http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/0526/Does-feeding-cattle-antibiotics-contribute-to-global-warming
Feeding antibiotics to farm animals may be another factor in global warming, according to a new study published this week that found higher amounts of methane, a gas well known to contribute to global warming, in the manure of cattle fed the now-common drugs.
"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of antibiotics increasing methane emissions," the international team of researchers wrote in a study published Wednesday in the Proceedings for the Royal Society B. The antibiotics kill bacteria that compete with methane-producing microbes, they reported, and so the drugs wind up allowing those microbes flourish.
"We know that there are negative consequences of antibiotics, particularly this effect of antibiotic resistance," co-author Tobin Hammer, a doctoral student at the University of Colorado Boulder, told NBC. "But this was a pretty unexpected link between antibiotics and this other important environmental issue that we care about greenhouse gases."
Originally, the team hoped to learn about the drugs' impact on dung beetles, who burrow in cows' manure a habit that might help combat the methane in the manure, according to previous studies.