Arctic bird droppings spread pollutants from ocean to land

This is an amazing article. I read stuff like this and wonder if humankind has any future left on this planet. It's the dominoe effect. What a mess! Some of these chemicals haven't been used for some time, but persist in the environment.

I posted a thread about the use of Agent Orange and other chemicals HERE. This was done deliberately. What hope is there when pollutants are spread inadvertently, like in this case, making situations worse?

Arctic bird droppings spread pollutants from ocean to land

Last Updated Thu, 14 Jul 2005 21:57:03 EDT
CBC News

Bird droppings are a major route used to spread chemical contaminants such as mercury and DDT to the High Arctic, Canadian researchers have found.

Scientists had assumed winds were the main way that the chemicals spread.


Northern fulmars
(Courtesy: Grant Gilchrist, Canadian Wildlife Service)

Seabirds seem to be inadvertently causing 60 per cent higher concentrations of contaminants, including some like DDT that are no longer in use in North America but persist in the environment.

The results could explain why people living in the Arctic show such high levels of pollutants although they aren't near industries producing the chemicals.

Researchers from three Canadian universities and the Canadian Wildlife Service conducted the study, which appears in the July 15 issue of the journal Science.

They studied ponds below cliffs on Cape Vera, Devon Island, in Nunavut.

Seabirds called northern fulmars nest above the cliffs, where their droppings fall into the once-pristine water. Areas near the gull-like birds showed the highest pollutant levels.

The contaminants are washed into the ocean, where the birds feast on fish and then return to the Arctic to feed their young.

When the birds return north, the contaminants they've accumulated are released on land in a "boomerang effect," said the study's lead author, Jules Blais, a professor of environmental toxicology of the University of Ottawa.

"The droppings will affect the lakes, but they're also bioaccumulating contaminants like mercury, DDT, PCBs and so forth," said co-author John Smol, a biology professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont.

Plants and animals could be exposed to the pollutants in the bird droppings, although researchers aren't yet sure what the impact is on the terrestrial food chain, such as polar bears.

"If there are fish in the system, those fish will bioconcentrate those chemicals," said biology Prof. Marianne Douglas of the University of Toronto. "Whatever eats the fish could be humans, that could be other wildlife, will end up with toxic levels of pollutants."

The contaminants found in the ponds were DDT, mercury and hexachlorobenzene, found in pesticides.

The research was sponsored by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the EJLB Foundation, the Polar Continental Shelf Project, and the Northern Scientific Training Program.

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