Chemical in Yangtze River causes deformities in Chinese sturgeon
By Tan Ee Lyn
HONG KONG (Reuters) – A paint chemical that is widely used in China is leaking into the Yangtze river and may be responsible for deformities and decreasing numbers of rare wild Chinese sturgeon, a study has found. In an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers said a significant proportion of juvenile sturgeon caught at the river had either one or no eyes, or had misshapen skeletons. Chinese sturgeon, which have existed on earth for 140 million years, are among the first class of protected animals in China. The slow-growing fish has an increased capacity to accumulate the paint chemical triphenyltin (TPT), which contains tin. The experts collected two- and three-day old Chinese sturgeon larvae from a spawning area below the Gezhouba Dam, which is 38 km (24 miles) downstream from the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. They later hatched in a laboratory in Jingzhou city in central Hubei province where 6.3 percent were found with skeletal deformities and 1.2 percent had either no eyes or just one eye. “Maternal transfer of TPT … in eggs of wild Chinese sturgeon poses a significant risk to the larvae naturally fertilized or hatched in the Yangtze River,” wrote the researchers, led by Hu Jiangying at the College of Urban and Environmental Sciences at Beijing University. …
