Origins of the Fish/Mercury Concerns

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imp

Senior Member
Pulling this from memory as a story, as usual. Prompted by just eating a can of tuna. Quite a long time ago, perhaps as far back as the early '70s, news gradually leaked out after mercury was being found in significant amounts in fish, of massive dumping of mercury into the ocean off of Japan. Seems some industry using it in their process found it easier or less expensive to dump the stuff, than reclaim it and sell it. Concerned, but not alarmed, I wondered how anyone could throw away so valuable a commodity as mercury. Young, naïve, unexposed to the industrial world's massive expanse of chemical use, I was.

Some years later, the "scare" was circulated widely, publicly. At first, typically, and politically, our government down-played mercury contained in fish product sold here. But, the horrendous metal was found in canned fish, and the "chase" began. Still going on today.

Somewhere along the way, I bought the needed analytical chemicals to check the fish I bought for mercury. My method was crude, to be sure, but nonetheless, dangerous levels would surely be detected. They were not. I found none.

Seems that "biological magnification", the process by which tiny ocean organisms ingesting dangerous shit, get consumed by larger organisms, which then add to their "load" of pollutant, this chain multiplying the poison content by millions of times once it reaches it's ultimate destination: the BIG fish. Like tuna.

Ms. Warrigal may have further recollection of this history. Her background of things technical, including Chemistry, has been most worthy of these adits. imp
 

Yes that's about how I remember it too.
Dumping wastes in our rivers was a source of contamination of fish and shellfish too.

When I was in my forties I went back to uni to complete a degree in maths/chemistry.
One of my chemistry library research topics was the effect of chemicals known as organochlorides on non target species.
In effect, this meant looking at how insecticides like DDT, Dieldrin and Aldrin end up accumulating in the body tissues of fish, chickens, sheep and cattle and ultimately in the tissues of humans.

The chemicals enter the soils and the water systems that drain from them and are picked up by plants and also by simple organisms like worms and oysters. These are then eaten by small fish, molluscs, crabs, birds etc and the chemicals become a little more concentrated in their cells, especially in the fatty tissues. The process continues all the way up the food chain to the higher order predators like eagles and large omnivores like us.

This is the main way that mercury enters our systems too although small amounts can be absorbed through the skin.
It doesn't matter whether you are vegetarian or not. If it is in the soil and the water supply you will be absorbing it over your lifetime.

My library research covered the presence of DDT byproducts in breast milk. The mothers who were most health conscious, eating mostly fish and chicken, actually had higher levels than those who ate more red meat. Free range eggs can contain more DDT than battery ones because they scratch in the dirt and eat worms rather than a diet of all pellets.

This is the reason why farmers are no longer allowed to drench their crops and the soil with products that have very long half lives.
 
Warri, you are a virtual store-house of the most valuable information pertaining to our continuing existence as a species, and I thank you for taking the time.

I personally knew (a neighbor), a cotton farmer outside Phoenix who was seen dumping an unused tank of Paraquat, a weed-killer, along the roadway. He was considered a pillar of the community. Never learned whether he did any jail time. The users of such materials must certainly be aware of the risks, both environmentally and legally. He was not. imp
 

In the past cotton and tobacco crops were drenched in insecticides including DDT, dieldrin and Aldrin, and it accumulated in the soils and when the land was later used for food crops it was still there although a lot had leached into the ground water and the rivers. Another source of contamination was the building industry. Timber was treated to prevent borer infestation and once inside the building this was not a problem but the wooden pallets used to move stacks of bricks and other items moved by fork lifts were often recycled, often used to build chicken coops. From here, the DDT leached out in the rain and added to the burden in the soil etc.

On the plus side, after WWII DDT saved countless lives from starvation by increasing crop yields and from diseases such as plague and malaria, at least before the fleas and mosquitos developed immunity to the chemicals.
 
And you know who you have to blame for Japan's whaling industry?

The good ol' U.S. of A.


After the war, in 1946, no less a figure than Douglas MacArthur proposed that Japan should resume whaling to supply protein for the conquered nation. Their whaling ships had been destroyed during the war, and Mac's actions resulted from the U.S. not wanting to incur the expense of shipping food to Japan.

Of course the Japanese people took this and ran with it, and coupled with Deming's teachings on constant improvement in their industries, which they took to heart, today you have the situation you have.
 
Warrigal said:
In the past cotton and tobacco crops were drenched in insecticides including DDT, dieldrin and Aldrin, and it accumulated in the soils and when the land was later used for food crops it was still there although a lot had leached into the ground water and the rivers. Another source of contamination was the building industry. Timber was treated to prevent borer infestation and once inside the building this was not a problem but the wooden pallets used to move stacks of bricks and other items moved by fork lifts were often recycled, often used to build chicken coops. From here, the DDT leached out in the rain and added to the burden in the soil etc.

On the plus side, after WWII DDT saved countless lives from starvation by increasing crop yields and from diseases such as plague and malaria, at least before the fleas and mosquitos developed immunity to the chemicals.
Click to expand...

The chain or cycle of how pollutants get into the food chain is important and was learned over time. It's easy to blame or shame past generations for what are now considered mistakes or negligence. But as soon as they are informed it should not be business as usual.

I remember the crying Indian from the 60-70s for an anti littering campaign. To this day people still litter. Same for seeing news reports and documentaries on pollution including picture of crap being dumped into rivers. And look at what western companies have done in their name in places like China.

Now people are complaining people are using too much bleach which winds up in the water supply and affects prescribed medications use every day. But if one doesn't clean or sanitize there would be bigger problems than ineffective medication.

Still one should think what happens to their trash. Too many think they put it in a can they did their job. It's a bit more than that.
 
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For the unitiated here, there is a very significant difference between poison such as Mercury, Arsenic, Cadmium, and the like, and "Endocrine Disrupting" man-made chemicals like the stuff Warrigal mentioned. DDT, Dieldrin, Aldrin, 2,4,D, and hundreds of others screw up the human hormonal balance because they act like Estrogen, the primary female gender hormone, and the body mistakenly thinks they ARE Estrogen, and take them up out of our foodstuffs and store them in our fatty tissues.

So, "heavy metal" toxins like Mercury, which also accumulates in the human body, poisons as more and more is ingested. Endocrine Disruptors simply disappear into our bodies, producing no toxic effects until perhaps several generations later. IOW, they are passed along to infants, who grow up to pass them along, both the initial "load', and more accumulated while growing up to adulthood, and then the sh!t is passed along to the next group of kids. Real heavy loads are bad, though, in that they are proven to drastically reduce sperm counts in men, and often are "effeminizing". Most of these disruptors are used widely as pesticides. Some very potent ones are herbicides. Either wind up in the food chain. Several other types, PCBs for example, were extremely widely used globally for many decades as cooling fluids for heavy electrical equipment, mainly transformers. If you live where they still hang above ground on posts, consider the hundreds of thousands of them which contained (and LEAKED) PCBs, and some idea may be gotten of the enormity of the pollution extent. imp
 
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imp said:
For the unitiated here, there is a very significant difference between poison such as Mercury, Arsenic, Cadmium, and the like, and "Endocrine Disrupting" man-made chemicals like the stuff Warrigal mentioned. DDT, Dieldrin, Aldrin, 2,4,D, and hundreds of others screw up the human hormonal balance because they act like Estrogen, the primary female gender hormone, and the body mistakenly thinks they ARE Estrogen, and take them up out of our foodstuffs and store them in our fatty tissues.

So, "heavy metal" toxins like Mercury, which also accumulates in the human body, poisons as more and more is ingested. Endocrine Disruptors simply disappear into our bodies, producing no toxic effects until perhaps several generations later. IOW, they are passed along to infants, who grow up to pass them along, both the initial "load', and more accumulated while growing up to adulthood, and then the sh!t is passed along to the next group of kids. Real heavy loads are bad, though, in that they are proven to drastically reduce sperm counts in men, and often are "effeminizing". Most of these disruptors are used widely as pesticides. Some very potent ones are herbicides. Either wind up in the food chain. Several other types, PCBs for example, were extremely widely used globally for many decades as cooling fluids for heavy electrical equipment, mainly transformers. If you live where they still hang above ground on posts, consider the hundreds of thousands of them which contained (and LEAKED) PCBs, and some idea may be gotten of the enormity of the pollution extent. imp
Click to expand...

That's what I've always heard that transformers were a big source of PCBs especially because the liquid could leak. Same for some components in earlier generations of electronics like capacitors. Heavy metals are one reason many places consider electronic trash a pollutant. They get crushed, smashed, pulverized that is a lot of particulate or liquid debris in a land fill or dripping out of the back of a municipal trash truck which in turn would make to the water supply through run off.
 
Good point! I have seen mysterious juices leaking out of the back of garbage wagons. Those things crush and compact the contents to get lots in there. Imagine a body.......

imp
 

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