Years and years of using pesticides and other types of agricultural chemicals have taken a toll on animals in Australia.

Veterinary lecturer Matt Landos will give a speech regarding this issue at the Australian Veterinary Conference in Adelaide later this week. He has spent time investigating the ability of native fish to reproduce when they’re exposed to low levels of agricultural chemicals. He’s also looked at the more wide-spread problem of early embryo deaths as well as birth defects in chickens, horses and frogs. In addition, he’s studied dead honey bees and birds that were affected by these types of chemicals.

“The alarming thing is that exposure to just miniscule amounts of agrichemicals can affect the capacity of animals and people to reproduce and develop normally”, he said. “The bias of any new measures needs to be precautionary to protect the environment and human health, and not to protect the registration of the product”.

According to Landos, the national government should go through with a reconstruction of the regulations that are currently in place for the use of agricultural chemicals in order to accommodate for the knowledge from the assessment in order to find techniques to solve the problem of these chemicals negatively affecting the animal population.