Toxic rain, fish and lead shot occupied three days of an outdoor writers conference last week, leaving a kaleidoscope of impressions that were neither funny nor totally favorable.
Dr. Ralph Daley of Environment Canada, that government`s environmental watchdog agency, warned of a new threat called ”toxic rain.”
This is a ”very new term” that goes beyond the threat of acid rain, he told the Association of Great Lakes Outdoor Writers. Acid rain is a damaging condition caused by inorganic chemical changes in the atmosphere;
toxic rain involves poisonous organic compounds.
As with acid rain, they are transported in the atmosphere, sometimes thousands of miles.
Daley reported that Canadian scientists are finding a ”whole suite of organics that are volatile. They fall out of the air either by precipitation or dry fall or by direct gaseous exchange between air and water.
”There is clear evidence that those compounds are present, and that they cover a range of chemical species, and that some are very toxic. They are being deposited in urban areas on a very small scale and on a regional scale from incinerators. We even see them on an international scale. DDT is still being deposited in the Arctic of Canada, and there is fairly good evidence that it is coming from Mexico. There are pesticides in the southern United States that have never been used in Canada, and yet, some have been found in Lake Superior.”
Daley said, however, that supporting scientific data is ”very bad because we have very inadequate methodology for measuring depositions. But, for instance, in Lake Superior there is a good likelihood that up to 90 percent of the total organic chemical burden is coming directly onto the lake from organic depositions.
”It has a direct food effect. I mean it is also being deposited on the food consumed by humans, and we are concerned that the surveillance-research early intelligence-gathering levels determine whether this is, in fact, a cause for major concern.”
Another area of toxicity that occupied the conference was the questionable practice of discouraging people from eating fish laced with PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls). These have been alleged–but not proved in any way–to be linked to cancer.
The finding of PCBs chemical byproducts in our waters and seafood has led to widespread public health warnings to limit consumption of certain Great Lakes species, notably large chinook salmon and lake trout.
Government testing practices have been bitterly criticized by sport fishing organizations, which claim that the findings are biased against consumption. This discourages people from using the sport fishery, they say.
Sport fishermen particularly rue the established government practice of grinding and measuring whole fillets with skin on, including belly fat and back fin area. These areas, which are not normally consumed, store the majority of PCBs.
A widely publicized test by Chicago`s 2,000-member Salmon Unlimited organization compared fillets tested in the government manner with fillets from the same fish that had been cleaned in a manner that eliminates most PCBs. The results showed that properly cleaned fish averaged .604 parts per million of PCBs, well below the government`s minimum standard of 2 parts per million.
The SU study contends that skinless fillets with back and belly fat trimmed and the lateral vein area removed account for a 68 percent reduction in fat content and the elimination of most PCBs. It also contends that fillets tested in the government manner averaged only 1.92 parts per million, which still is below the government`s health warning standard.
This issue was debated again last week in light of findings that PCBs may not be even the least bit harmful to humans and, in fact, regular consumption of oily fish like Great Lakes salmon and trout indeed may help reduce heart disease. So far, no government agency, in the effort to alarm people about PCBs, has been able to cite anything more substantial than one flawed study of a 20-year-old incident concerning Japanese rice oil.
Dr. Edward Horn, chief of New York State`s Environmental Protection Agency, was asked if he knew of any death directly attributable to consumption of any kind of fish.
”Not in the U.S. that I`m aware of,” he said. He did add that there is one documentation of a woman in Japan who became ill while on a swordfish diet and subsequently died of mercury poisoning.
He and Dr. Michael Voiland of the Federal Sea Grant project in New York indicated that recent studies of Eskimos, Japanese and Dutch fishermen who consume great quantities of oily fish indicate a low incidence of heart disease. Voiland explained that fish oil contains an amino acid with the remarkable ability to remove cholesterol from the bloodstream and heart.
”There may, in fact, be more benefits to eating lake fish than not,”
he told the conference. ”We probably should eat at least 11 ounces of oily fish a week.”
The battle to eliminate one other toxic problem–the lead shot used by waterfowl hunters–was supported by several government spokesmen. They presented evidence that the innocent consumption of lead shot kills more than 2 million ducks each year, more ducks than provided by all of the Ducks Unlimited projects in Canada. Lead shot, in fact, probably kills more than the entire legal harvest of the Atlantic Flyway. The spokesmen poured out new studies designed to encourage more hunters to switch to nontoxic steel shot. Some show that steel can be just as effective for shooters as lead, if only hunters will learn how to use it.
Because steel shot travels faster, the aim necessarily must be closer to the moving target. A shot string of steel is two-thirds that of lead. In other words, a string of 18 feet with lead will be only 12 feet with steel.
”The major problem is that most hunters are terrible shots,” Jack Sheridan of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Boston said. ”Every study shows they are lousy shots.”
Tests in various states show that hunters average from 6 to 10 shells per bird, depending upon conditions.
”Nobody practices,” Sheridan said. ”You`ve got to try a couple of rounds of trap or skeet with steel shot just to see how it behaves, and very few hunters ever go that far. They wait until the waterfowl season opens and then they go and shoot at birds. And when they miss, they blame the shot load.”
All the grumbling by hunters over the imminent loss of lead shot will not change the fact that our country will be using steel shot for waterfowl exclusively by 1991. Canada and several European countries are watching this
”experiment” and are expected to follow suit. Hunters are simply going to have to learn to use steel.
Several expert wingshots at the conference report they have no problems with steel. Some hone their touches by using steel for all game, including pheasants, quail and rabbit. There`s no point in mastering two types of techniques, they feel. Toxic lead shot soon will be considered an anathema for all species, so they believe we might as well make the switch now instead of later.
The compensation comes by switching from ”full” to ”improved” choke on our shotguns. Studies overwhelmingly show that hunters using improved chokes have vastly higher success rates with steel. Improved chokes simply scatter the shot through wider and more effective patterns, making up for the speed and density of steel.
No caring hunter these days should object much to steel. This is at least one toxic problem that we can help control.
