Transcript:

A Deadly LegacyAmbience: StreamMercury was widely employed as a drug for centuries; dentists used to use it to fill cavities. But we now know that Mercury is toxic to humans and the environment. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Bill Hopkins is an associate professor of Fish and Wildlife Conservation at Virginia Tech .Hopkins: Mercury's actually a naturally occurring element, but the problem is that a number of industrial processes and mining processes liberate that mercury from the environment in abnormally high concentrations, and, because it's a natural trace element, it's not something that degrades in the environment. It can change chemical forms and be more or less available to accumulate in wildlife tissues and in human tissues, but the bottom line is is once we liberate that into the environment, it's pretty much there to stay, and it's gonna cycle through food webs. We're interested in how a mother's health affects the health of her babies. And much of what we do is we try to monitor things like pollutants in the environment and how a female might accumulate those pollutants in her tissues and then pass those onto her babies. So, when we're talking about something like a turtle, these organisms lay eggs. And so, they can actually deposit things like mercury, PCBs a number of contaminants that we humans have actually introduced into the environment, and then, wildlife pay the consequences, oftentimes, for those activities. We suffer the consequences too. People who eat fish contaminated with mercury can develop serious health problems.Hopkins: In certain systems, there are strategies that can be used to actually remove the mercury from contaminated wetlands, for example. Some of my colleagues are working on techniques to try to use various forms of carbon to actually absorb and make that mercury unavailable so it could even potentially be harvested from these wetlands and removed.Pulse of the Planet is made possible in part by the National Science Foundation; I'm Jim Metzner