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Last week, NYT featured the following article by David Jolly which certainly deepens concerns about plastic additives. Thanks to Angela who sent me the link.

Excerpt:

About five years ago, Alain Lenoir, a researcher at François Rabelais University in Tours, France, was studying the biochemical process by which ants differentiate between friends and foes.

Scientists had come to understand that the insects used their antennae to sense the makeup of the hydrocarbons of other ants’ cuticles. Using chemical analyses like gas chromatography, Dr. Lenoir had begun focusing in particular on hydrocarbons on Lasius niger, the common black ant.

Dr. Lenoir, who has been studying ants since 1968, found something unexpected: in addition to the hydrocarbons, the analysis was consistently revealing the presence of plastic additives called phthalates, and not just in a few specimens – all of them.

Other scientists had reported such findings, he said, but he had brushed off the presence of those chemicals as contamination that occurred in the lab.

Intrigued, Dr. Lenoir, today an emeritus professor, decided to follow up with a new study. The results, published in last month’s issue of Science of the Total Environment, an academic journal, confirmed what he had already come to fear.

All of the ants that he and his team studied were contaminated with phthalates, regardless of where the insects originated. For example, the chemical made up as much as 0.59 percent of the substances on the cuticles of ants that had just been collected in a field near Tours.

In another experiment, Dr. Lenoir’s team kept the ants in the laboratory in an open plastic box that contained no phthalates. Nonetheless, the amount of the chemicals on the ants’ cuticles actually increased – indicating that the phthalates were present in the air and stuck to the ants’ cuticles. (The quantity of phthalates on the cuticles of ants in closed boxes did not increase).

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