Ear wax from whales records ocean contaminants – ‘It’s been 30-plus years since we’ve stopped using DDT, but to still see it showing up at such high concentrations is surprising’
By Rhitu Chatterjee
16 September 2013 (NPR) – How often do whales clean their ears? Well, never. And so, year after year, their ear wax builds up, layer upon layer. According to a study published Monday, these columns of ear wax contain a record of chemical pollution in the oceans. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used the ear wax extracted from the carcass of a blue whale that washed ashore on a California beach back in 2007. Scientists at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History collected the wax from inside the skull of the dead whale and preserved it. The column of wax was almost a foot long. “It’s kind of got that icky look to it,” says Sascha Usenko, an environmental scientist at Baylor University who was involved in the study. “It looks kind of like a candle that’s been roughed up a bit. It looks waxy and has got fibers. But it’s pretty rigid — a lot stronger and a lot more stable than one would think.” There are light and dark layers within the column, each layer corresponding to six months of the whale’s life, Usenko says. Historically the rings have been used to estimate the age of the whale, he says, “very similar to counting tree rings.” But age is not what Usenko was after. He studies how chemical pollutants like DDT and flame retardants are affecting whales. These pollutants get deposited in fatty tissues, such as whale blubber. And scientists often analyze blubber to see what whales are eating. But analyzing blubber has a limitation, Usenko says. “I would only know that organism — that [particular] animal was exposed to those contaminants,” he says. “I wouldn’t know when.” And so he thought, why not look at ear wax, which is also a fatty material that accumulates toxic chemicals. Because each layer of wax corresponds to six months of a whale’s life, by working through a plug of wax, Usenko could figure out when the animal was exposed to a particular chemical. In this case, Usenko and his colleagues found that the whale had been exposed to worrisome pollutants throughout its lifetime. He says the high levels of DDT surprised him. “It’s been 30-plus years since we’ve stopped using this compound,” he says, “but to still see it showing up at such high concentrations — one of the dominant chemicals we see — was surprising.” Usenko and his team also determined that “a significant percentage of the exposure occurred in the first, early stages of the animal’s life,” when it was still nursing, and perhaps especially vulnerable. At that point, the pollutants came from the mother, through her milk, the scientist says. [more]
There are a number of countries that never banned the use of DDT, including Mexico. So actually, it is not surprising to realize that this is still being released into our environment.
Devvy Kidd (American writer) continues to advocate the use of DDT, claiming it is harmless.
from:
http://www.devvy.com/new_site/avatar_121609.html
"If you think this sounds as if Al Gore wrote the script for "Avatar," not James Cameron, you may be right. This theme of kill all the humans, especially the pro-American, capitalist humans, has long been an underlying message of the left-wing, environmentalist movement, beginning with Rachel Carson's hysterical plea to ban DDT, even though, to this day, there is no evidence that DDT is harmful to humans or the environment, and even though the use of DDT can save millions of human lives from the deadly disease of malaria.
I wrote Kidd about this position, she refused to accept any facts that DDT is a killer to humans and everything else.
The anti-environment spew often raised by Kidd and others often chooses blind ignorance (willful denial) of what is scientific fact. Yet they still manage to create a following and mislead a great many people.
Keep up the good work Des, there aren't many like you. ~Survival Acres~