The
news article does not state specifically why it is happening, but it is
a trend over the past two years:
href="http://www.thestar.com/Environment/article/232782">Great
Lakes fish getting worse: Study
Jul 05, 2007
11:36 AM
Catherine
Porter
Toronto Star
Environment
Reporter
Toxins
that once only surfaced in big fish are making
their way down the food chain, a sign that the Great Lakes are getting
even more polluted, a new report says.
In the past two years, smaller sizes of salmon, trout and carp have
been slapped with strict consumption warnings - and some with outright
bans - in many areas of the Great Lakes and particularly in Lake
Ontario.
"In Lake Ontario, between 2005 and 2007, you had eight categories of
advisories getting worse and just one improving. As bad as the
situation is, you've got a trend line that's getting worse," said Aaron
Freeman, policy director of the advocacy group Environmental Defence
and the author of the report entitled “Up to the
Gills.”
Warnings about eating fish longer than 75 centimetres have been in
place for years, as they accumulate toxics like mercury and furans in
their fat over years. Now, fish around 55 centimetres long, which
haven't had as much time to accumulate toxins, are starting to show
dangerous levels. That's a sign that pollution has become more
widespread, the report says.
I lived in Michigan during the late 70's when the PCB crisis was
discovered. It ultimately led to the discontinuation of the
manufacture of PCBs (
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_biphenyls">polychlorinated
biphenyls). People were horrified that these
chemicals could be found in human breast milk from mothers in the area.
More recently, it has been shown that there were
href="http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=153540">alterations
in the sex ratios of human cohorts born in that era.
In 2001, it was reported that there were
href="http://www.ehponline.org/docs/2001/109p605-611schantz/abstract.html">Impairments
of Memory and Learning in Older Adults Exposed to Polychlorinated
Biphenyls Via Consumption of Great Lakes Fish.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
A
href="http://www.chem.unep.ch/pops/POPs_Inc/press_releases/pressrel-2k/pr12.htm">news
report from 2000 indicated that the PCB levels were
declining,
but the rate of improvement was slowing.
The PCB crisis was not the only problem to afflict the Great Lakes
during that period. In the late 1960's, high mercury levels
led to the end of commercial fishing there. In 1969, the
Cuyahoga River, which drains into Erie,
href="http://www.ec.gc.ca/EnviroZine/english/issues/58/feature3_e.cfm">caught
fire in downtown Cleveland, Ohio.
The current (2007)
report does not mention specific contaminants. It was
compiled by serially examining the yearly Canadian Government's
href="http://www.ene.gov.on.ca/envision/guide/">Guide
to Eating Ontario Sport Fish, which only lists
total quantities of contaminants in different species, by length and by
geographic area.
Even if the PCB situation is improving, these more recent findings are
highly worrisome. The PCB crisis showed how serious these
problems can be, and how long they can last.
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Thanks for adding detail to this depressing report.
I too am old enough to remember the first Great Lakes Die-off. I lived in Minnesota in the late 70s-early 80s. Mostly PCBs then, mostly mercury now.
I am assuming the current crisis will be attributed to heavy metals but perhaps there's some new toxin in the mix?
The original report did not contain any details about the nature of the contaminants; just the quantity. However, a Canadian news organization CTV.gov, reported:
The usual suspects, then. Guess they are making a comeback. Can we clean up the lakes a second time, not much more than 30 years after we cleaned them up the first time?
And here I thought the Clear Air and Water Acts would keep us ahead of that, and keep the trout happy in Lake Superior. I thought the next Great Lakes crisis was supposed to be invasive species, from zebra mussels to Eurasian milfoil. (sigh)
It's like that Galbraith quote about economics. Something like, "One crisis is separated from the next by the time it takes to forget about the causes." I'm from the Great Lakes region too and it's really a shame that so much good work could be coming undone.