By Crystal Gammon and Environmental Health News Thirty years ago, a Canadian marine biologist noticed something mysterious was happening to beluga whales in the St. Lawrence Estuary. Decades of over-hunting had decimated the population, but several years after the government put a stop to the practice, the belugas still hadn’t recovered. Two decades and hundreds of carcasses later, he had an answer. “They were dying of cancer,” said Daniel Martineau, now a professor of pathology at the University of Montreal. The white whales were victims of intestinal cancers caused by industrial pollutants released into the St. Lawrence River by nearby aluminum smelters. Now research points to environmental pollutants as the cause of deadly cancers in several wildlife populations around the world. Normally rare in wildlife, cancers in California sea lions, North Sea flounder and Great Lakes catfish seem to have been triggered or accelerated by environmental contaminants. Other animals, including Tasmanian Devils, sea turtles, woodchucks, eels and sperm whales, also have been stricken with cancers, although they appear to stem from natural causes, including viruses, spontaneous tumors, or genetic factors. In some cases, the survival of a species and the stability and biodiversity of an ecosystem is jeopardized. The cancers also highlight the dangers that industrial activities pose – not just to animals, but to people in the same areas, exposed to the same compounds. “We know that toxic compounds in the environment can cause cancer in humans, so it’s not a far stretch to realize that pollutants can cause cancer in animals,” says Denise McAloose, a pathologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, who recently reviewed the topic in the journal Nature Reviews Cancer. …
Cancer in Wildlife May Signal Toxic Dangers
