Our thirst for pineapple may be causing mutations in Costa Rica's sloths
Last edited Sun Mar 3, 2024, 10:05 AM - Edit history (1)
Genetic abnormalities in sloths are on the rise in parts of Costa Rica. The pineapple industry may be to blame
By LEVI STALLINGS
PUBLISHED MARCH 2, 2024 9:00AM (EST)
This albino sloth was named Goldie by the Sloth Conservation Foundation (Dr. Rebecca Cliffe/The Sloth Conservation Foundation)
For more than a decade, animal rescue centers in Central America have reported receiving a strangely high number of baby sloths with genetic mutations. Dr. Rebecca Cliffe was working on her Ph.D. near San Clemente at the Sloth Sanctuary of Costa Rica when she first began noticing sloths with misshapen limbs, missing appendages and albinism.
“They were often missing fingers and toes, sometimes the entire lower arm would be missing, sometimes the entire limb. The ears and the jaws were very prone to being deformed,” Cliffe said in an interview with Salon. Besides sloths with genetic mutations that have been taken into rescue centers, many others have been spotted in the wild. “Here in the South Caribbean, we regularly see sloths with missing arms, missing fingers and toes, still living in the wild, some of them as adults thriving,” Cliffe said.
Although some missing appendages are lost to predators or other injuries, genetic mutations are apparent from birth. In the time since her first observations in 2010, Dr. Cliffe hasn’t been the only researcher in the area to notice this phenomenon. Andrés Bräutigam is one of the veterinarians for the Toucan Rescue Ranch, another animal sanctuary in Costa Rica.
“Most of the alterations I have seen are more related to internal organs. I've seen specifically congenital conditions associated with problems and development of lungs, problems and developments of hearts,” Bräutigam said, also mentioning problems associated with cognition and temperature regulation. “Mutations like the ones I have personally seen are often underdiagnosed because they require heavy medical exploration.”
More:
https://www.salon.com/2024/03/02/our-thirst-for-pineapple-may-be-causing-mutations-in-costa-ricas-sloths/
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They are kept desperately poor by lack of other available work, and forced to accept starvation wages, and when they attempt to organize unions, the corporations hire mercenaries (paramilitaries, or "death squads"
who terrorize them, follow them, send death threats any number of ways, even get on their buses taking them from the plantations to their homes, before they start getting deadly serious, beating, multilating, then finally murdering them. U.S. corporations have been sued for their part in these atrocities.
It was illustrated in stark terms when one of the workers who lived in a house surrounded by tropical trees was so sick from his pesticide-delivered disease he would run out of his house and vomit outdoors. At some point, parrots who lived in the trees above them actually picked up the sound of vomiting themselves and would sit in the trees and fly around sounding as if they were vomiting. I could never forget that, after reading it the first time.