Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[Intro Music begins]
[Steven Sobieszczyk] Good or bad, you know an issue has infiltrated the public consciousness
when it has been satired in the Sunday paper. However, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and pollutants
in our rivers are no laughing matter.
Hello and welcome. I'm Steven Sobieszczyk. In today's episode of the USGS CoreCast we're
exploring what impact water pollution has on the health and the development of aquatic
wildlife. Since the 1990s there have been numerous studies around the country that have
been investigating how a wide range of chemical compounds, industrial pollutants, and human
by-products have made it into our Nation's waterways. Traditionally, most people were
not overly concerned about this because the old mantra used to be "dilution is the solution
to pollution" However, this is far from true. In fact, recent studies have shown a much
starker reality. After the contaminants make it into the rivers and streams, tests now
show that there are measurable quantities of these contaminants within the water, itself,
as well as in the under-water sediments, the nearby aquatic insects, migratory fish that
were eating these insects, and even predatory wildlife that consume all these different
organisms.
In the last few years the USGS has increased its efforts to monitor these emerging contaminants
in lakes and rivers around the United States, including the Potomac, Mississippi, Colorado,
and Columbia Rivers. To explore, in more detail, one example of what impact these contaminants
are having in our nearby streams, we traveled to the Pacific Northwest to talk with a team
of USGS scientists about an ongoing study that characterizes the contaminants and habitats
for a number of aquatic species along the lower Columbia River. This contaminant and
habitat study, or ConHab for short, is a multidisciplinary research project composed of 12 USGS scientists
from 7 different states, including Oregon, Washington, California, Colorado, Missouri,
Texas, and Louisiana. Using their unique expertise in chemistry, biology, geology, and hydrology,
these researchers have been exploring emerging contaminants, such as flame-retardants, pharmaceuticals,
personal care products, and industrial chemicals in the Columbia River.
[Elena Nilsen] What we refer to as emerging contaminants can mean many different kinds
of chemicals. To understand what these chemicals are we just need to think about our urban
lifestyle. And we know that we use products everyday that have chemicals in them, and
that they end up going through wastewater treatment plants because plants weren't designed
to take these chemicals out. And they eventually end up in the rivers. Similarly, industrial
processes that have their own treatment process probably don’t remove all these chemicals.
So there are various ways that these chemicals get into the environment, but we know they
are getting into the environment and we're concerned about the effects they might be
having on organisms that live in the Columbia River.'
[Steven Sobieszczyk] In order to effectively assess the impact of chemical pollutants in
an environmental setting there must be a clear objective for the investigation. The approach
used by investigators in this study focused on 3 sites that represented a gradation of
contamination, with a focus on how this contamination affected a number of species within a predefined
food web.
[Elena Nilsen] So at the ConHab study sites, we're sampling several levels of the food
web to try and answer this question of "are the chemicals there and are they moving from
one organism to another?" We're using passive samplers to try to tell us what the chemical
concentrations are in the water; we're collecting sediments; we're collecting invertebrate biomass,
or the bugs that live on the bottom of the river; we're collecting largescale suckers
as a resident fish; and we collecting osprey eggs, a bird of prey that eats the largescale
sucker.
[Jennifer Morace] So many of the newer emerging compounds we don't have great toxicity information
for, so it's hard for us to know at "x" concentration this will happen to a biode or to a fish.
So that wass part of why we decided to do a foodweb study to try and look at if we're
seeing these concentrations in the river, what does this mean for the fish? Can we tell
if with the biomarkers....that helps us tell if there are effects we're seeing in the fish
and trying to tie those back to the contaminant concentrations. Then, likewise, trying to
see what effects it might be having on the osprey and other portions of the foodweb.
[Steven Sobieszczyk] With the ConHab study finishing up, results demonstrating how emerging
contaminants impact aquatic wildlife prove very interesting.
[Elena Nilsen] As far as the concentrations of contaminants in the fish at the three sites,
we looked also not just at whole fish, but we looked at five different tissues. We looked
at brains, ***, stomachs, fillets, and livers. And the concentrations in the livers
were higher at all the sites than the other tissues that we looked at. This makes sense
if you think of the liver as filtering out the toxins of the fish's body. Preliminary
results do indicate that we're seeing a difference in some of the biomarkers between the sites,
as well. For instance, the gonadal somatic index, or the ratio of *** size to the mass
of the organism. And some of the *** viability and motility studies are showing lower ***
motility and viability at the sites with higher concentrations of contaminants.
[Steven Sobieszczyk] Since most of the data for this project was collected at three sites,
finding a way to project, or extrapolate, this data across the length of the Columbia
River was nearly as important as the data collection, itself.
[Elena Nilsen] As part of the project we have done some sediment transport modeling. This
is an important part of the project because our thought is that a lot of these emerging
contaminants are going to be associated with suspended sediments in the river. You can
think of them as being very sticky. So they stick to the sediments and move throughout
the systems on the sediments. So, by modeling the transport of the sediments we get an idea
of the distribution of these contaminants throughout the larger system.
[Animation 1 - Streamflow]
[Elena Nilsen] In this video we can see the flow changing direction and changing velocity,
with the higher velocities in red and lower in blue. This changes with tidal cycle. The
higher velocities, obviously, will transport the heavier sediment and transport more sediment,
overall. In the lower velocities is where we expect some of the sediment to start falling
out and be distributed on the bed.
[Animation 2 - Point-Source Tracer]
[Elena Nilsen] So in this video we're showing the foodweb area that's near the urbanized
corridor near Portland, where the Willamette River comes in. What this is is showing a
tracer input, it's approximating if a contaminant were introduced into the river how the dispersal
of the contaminant, with fine-grained sediments would be different at those different locations
given the different flow forcing, tidal influence versus the higher flow. In the top panel,
we're showing base flow, highlighting the tidal influence, and in the lower panel we're
showing the experimented high flow.
[Elena Nilsen] So some of these results are similar to what we're seeing in some of the
other studies done in, for instance, Lake Mead or Potomac. What's different is in some
of those studies we're seeing higher concentrations and maybe more obvious biological changes
in the fish, but what's different here is we're trying to piece together how the fish
fit into the foodweb as a whole.
[Jennifer Morace] If we could combine these types of foodweb studies with source identification
then we could try to tie contaminants to effects. And then also look for where the sources of
these contaminants are to work toward reduction to try and improve conditions in the ecosystem.
Because the Columbia River is a beautiful river, the Pacific Northwest is a great place,
it's very culturally important and we want to preserve that. And sometimes when people
look at the river now and the great setting that we have it's hard for them to image that
there are problems in this ecosystem. But we know there are hints at some of these problems
that may be arising and we want to stop that before we get to that type of condition that
leads us to where....some of the issues that like Chesapeake Bay or Lake Mead are trying
to deal with. We want to try and preserve our way of life here.
[Steven Sobieszczyk] If you want to learn more about the ConHab project or emerging
contaminants, as a whole, check out the links in our show transcripts, which you can find
at the CoreCast website at http://www.usgs.gov/corecast/. If you want to see what else is going on in
the Pacific Northwest, you can also check out the local podcast, the USGS Oregon Science
Podcast at http://or.water.usgs.gov/podcasts/ or http://or.usgs.gov/. If you want to follow
USGS daily, you can also go to our USGS social media website at http://www.usgs.gov/socialmedia/.
There you can follow the USGS on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Flickr.
Until next time. I'm Steven Sobieszczyk.
[Outro Music begins]
This podcast is a product of the U.S. Geological Survey, Department of the Interior.
[Outro Music ends]