Consumption

[DanIn]

How many anglers adhere to the Indiana fish consumption guide that the DNR puts out. From what I see, panfish are no risk at all but you get into the bass, walleye, and catfish etc., it gets kinda scary. I can see why carp and catfish would be high risk feeding off the bottom but what would be the reason for the gamefish being higher risk? Because they feed on the carp and catfish? Any thoughts?

[Fishnhunt]

The local Game warden here in KY told me that the consumption advisory was on ALL WATERS,including farm ponds and lakes.Fish food IS made from fish.Wonder how often they if anybody check those farm raised fish??? EMD( EAT MORE DEER)
GOOD DAY

[Moose1am]

Danin:
I saw on the TV news a few weeks ago that some guys in California have a new ANALYZER for Mercury in Fish that can analyze the fish very quickly. Like in a matter of miutes. The method that I have seen for testing water for mercury was very cumberson and took more than a day to complete. Test results took about 2 days to get out from the time of receiving the sample and Chain of custody forms to emailing the test result report to the client.

With this new system the testing should be much faster and easier to do.

Unfortunately the news on TV didn't give the name of the company that has invented this new analyzer or any other useful information. I found that rather strange that they would not give that information out. Maybe it's a trade secrete until they apply for the patents. Who really knows. But I sure hope that this becomes more plentify and gets into peoples hands so that we can test the fish we eat better.

I limit my consumption of crappie due to the worry about them containing too much mercury. Remember that mercury can accumulate inside the body and it's hard to get rid of this heavey metal. I did read that over time the body can excrete certain forms of mercury.

I know from first hand experience that the local and state officals don't easily put out warnings unless they really feel it's necessary. The last thing they wish to do is cause people to panic. I doubt if that would happen as most people basically just ignore the warnings about mercury. Not all people ignore it but a lot of people tend to schrug the warnings.

People would be wise to pay attention to them IMHO.



PS> Smaller fish have consumed much less food than larger fish. Since mercury can bioaccumulate in the fish the larger fish will most likey have the most mercury in them. But if you eat a lot of small fish you MAY get a dose that is equivalent to eating just one bigger fish.

Evidently the algae and small critters that live in the lake Zooplanton and Phytoplankton take up the mercury by feeding on bacteria or other organizms and they in turn are eaten by the minnows which in turn are eaten by the larger game fish. So the higher up the food chain a fish is the more likely it is to have mercury in it's flesh. Also if the lake is in close proximity to a coal fired power plant's smoke stacks that are not controlled then the lake is going to have more mercury in it's wateshed. Especially if that lake is downwind from the smoke stack. They have computer models that can be run to figure out the levels of mercury in a given area. But they need to have lots of data input for those models to work. Things like the wind row data and the amount of coal burned and the stack height and velocity of the stack gases as they exit the mouth of the stack. Also the air temp and the outside air stabilty effect these computer models. Garbage in will equal garbage out. To calibate the computer modeling they install monitors thoughout an are of interest and actually measure the amount of pollutant that is capture every 6 days for a year or more. PDS monitoring is required when a new power plant is proposed to be build in any Attainment area.

Regards,

Moose1am

[Moose1am]

There is much that has not been written about this problem. Mercury coming from smoke stacks fly ash is landing around the power plants and contaminating the land with mercury. This mercury eventually is washed into the water or lakes. Small microorganisms eat this mercury and it is concentrated up the food chain. We being at the top of the food chain are exposed to the most mercury. This is methyl mercury which is excreted very slowly from the body.

Mercury is posionous to the nervous system and can damage the brain of young children as well as the elderly as well as healthy human beings.

Care must be taken to not consume too much of this heavy metal (Mercury) over a time period.

Mercury can enter the body is other ways. Some vaccines were preserved with mercury and childern were exposed to this form of mercury.

I wore contact lenses and thimersole was used as a preservative in the contact lense soaking solutions. Mercury was used in paint along with lead to prevent mold from growing on the painted surfaces.

Don't you think that if a bass has mercury inside it that a crappie would also have the same type of mercury inside it? Maybe the concentrate would be less but that is because the crappie is smaller. Crappie feed on insects for the first few years and then switch to a minnow diet or small shad or herring type bait fish. So to do bass feed on these same prey species.

Just because the state or IDEM did not capture or analysis certain fish for mercury does not mean that they don't have mercury inside them. Unless you test for this substance you won't know. But I would think that if both fish eat the same prey speices that they both would be consuming and concentration the same mercury up the food chain.

I think about this all the time when I go fishing. But I studied chemistry in College as well as biology and took a lot of hard science courses. I am well aware of what is happening in the environment.

Even if tomorrow we could control all the mercury emission in the coal fire boilers the mercury would still be present in our environment for a long time.

Remember the solution to pollution is dilution. And the correllary is this. Pollution is too much of a substance in any one place. We can't eliminate mercury as it's a substance but we can put it somewhere where it can't harm people. Or we can dilute it so much that its not as harmful. ie lower the dose exposure and you can prevent some diseases maybe.

I personally limit my fish comsupmtion. But I still fish a lot. I fish mainly for crappie these days but for many years I fished mainly for largemouth bass or other game fish. I have been fishing for crappie as long as I can remember but that was mainly during the spring spawn. These days I chase the crappie at least three out of the four seasons. I will even go out on a nice warm winter's day to try to catch a few crappie.



Regards,

Moose1am

[WMAMOS]

You are well aware of what is happening in the environment and you make statements like "the solution to pollution is dilution"?????????? I think it is time you update your knowledge of environmental science Moose.

[Moose1am]

What's the alternative? Capture the air pollution and then bury it in the landfill or take the cake and use it to put heavy metals in the drywall? Then you get the building trades people all contaminated with that stuff when the sand the dry wall later on.

Tell me your defination of Pollution.

I think my thinking is right on the mark!

For over 100 years we have been diluting the pollution that is put into the rivers and the air. Our entire Clean Air Act of 1990 depends on limiting grains of pollution per DSCF of air lbs per hour. Our water regs limit the amount of pollutants put into the river to so many lbs/unit of water discharged or per unit of time. All these reg are designed to dispurse the pollutants over time.

If you have a better way I am sure that many engineers and scientists and other would love to hear what your ideas are.

Hopefully they can be done economically or they won't be done at all.



Regards,

Moose1am

[WMAMOS]

Moose,

I'm not going to get into a pissing match with you regaridng your theory on dilution. Bottom line, it is an archaic concept to think that dilution is the solution to pollution as a whole, especially when you talk about mercury. Pollutants like mercury do not break down in the environment so even if you release small concentrations over time, it all ends up in the same place...river and lake substrates and eventually into the tissues of humans and animals. It is just not an ecologically sustainable concept.

I'm not an air person but I work in the environmental field as a stormwater quality manager. Take your dilution is the solution theory to a group of environmental professionals and they'll laugh you right out of the room. Perhaps when you took your hard core science classes that was the philosophy, but things have changed. The push is for removing pollutants from the waste stream through education (change in habits) and new technologies (physical and biological). For example, check out the studies going on using mercury resistant bacteria to treat waste mercury.

The solution/remedy to mercury pollution is an alternative energy source. You are right, it isn't economically feasible today, but it is the solution versus a band-aid approach to the problem. As long as we continue to burn more and more coal, the problem will exist. In fact, the problem will exist forever unless we can develop technologies to remove the mercury from the water column. Until then, we are just adding to the problem.

[idbefishing]

there was an article somewhere a while back regarding the toxicity level in fish nationwide and Indiana is the second highest. It also, said that the majority of the mercury in our environment come from other country. They burn much more coal then we do and have less restriction on their practices. The mercury particles travel in atmospheric wind and settle in distant land like the U.S. Real truth or not, I believes it's very possible this is happening.

[Moose1am]

I don't know of many other countries that consume as much energy as we do here in the good old USA. We have abundant coal resources and we use them to great advantage here in the midwest. However the coal has some side effects.

I seriously doubt that we are getting much mercury from Europe or any other country. I very much suspect that most of the mercury found in our fish comes from the power plant right next door or much closer to your lake than those power plants overseas.

That is most likely a wide rumor being spread around by those that don't wish to have further controls put on the local power plants that are burning coal here in the midwest and avoiding the costs of complying with new air pollutions rules and emission limits.

Some power plants such as I&M in Rockport, IN don't have to control their emissions and just build taller smoke stack to try to dispurse the air pollutants higher up into the air. That works with the wind blows the pollution away from IN but when there is no wind the old adage that "What goes up must come down" still applies. And 99.99% of the time it comes down on your heads.



Regards,

Moose1am

[crappie66]

Moose I know you are quite the environmental scientist, and you may have even done research on this question while you were at Purdue. Do you know anything about the lake/pond behind the Purdue Powerplant. I know the powerplant burns coal since there are huge mountains of it back there. So do you think that lake has a high mercury level. We used to eat several meals of bluegill from there. We caught an 11 lb channel out of there that was badly hooked down the throat, so we tried to eat that, I think 3 bites were consumed and the rest unfortunately had to be thrown away. Oh how I miss fishing that lake, right across the street from one of my apartments, we would go back there just about everyday. Nothing to catch a bucket full of handsize and bigger bluegills, and 50 or 60 bass on any given trip, however only 1 in 10 bass would be decent 3 lbs or more.

Go PURDUE

[Moose1am]

I am guessing here but I would think that the vast majority of the mercury found in the fly ash would settle close to the smoke stack that it came out of. The larger the particle size the less distance it will drift or blow away from the source. Now the very find particulate matter will actually float in the air for long periods of time. Those fine particles may travel thousands of miles away from the point source. This will help dispurse the initial pollutants. But when you have a smoke stack that is continusouly streaming out pollants such as fly ash containing mercury in trace amounts it will eventually build up in the downwind environemnt.

I know that the levels in the fish are measured in PPM. I suspect that is parts per million parts on a weight/weight basis. In air pollution we measure PPM on a vol/vol basis by converting the molecular weight of the gas into a gas volume. One mole of a gas at STP will occupy a certain volume of space.

Anyway bottom line is that I would think that there is more mercury closer to the smoke stack in most cases.

I would have to know the particle size distribution of the gases and how the trace mercury was distributed in each particle size category. That would be a job to figure out. Maybe someone has already figure that out.

I do know that coal is a trickly devil to test. The coal seam can contain coal of different chemical composition.

Normally they will take a shovel of coal from a pile and store it in a burlap sack. They will take so many shovels of coal from the pile and then try to mix the samples up and then crush it. The crushed coal is then homogonized and divide up over and over again until they get a small plastic jar that is represenative of the entire coal pile out in the field. They will take samples from the coal pile as the loader takes a scoop out of the coal pile and loads that into a coal car that is waiting at the site. As the coal car is loaded by a front end loader a sampler will continue to take samples of the coal pile after each scoop from the front end loader. I know that at the end of the day the guy sampling the coal is tired, dirty as hell and ready for a hot shower and a good meal. I only did that job for a couple of days and believe me it will take a toll on your body. Just breathing in the coal dust on a hot summer day will about kill a man. LOL. I did this a few days to see what the coal sampling guys had to put up with. To test the coal we took small samples of the sample jar and tested them for sulfur content, BTU heat content, Ash content and melting point. Some of our clients wanted special analysis of the coal and we performed other tests on those samples.

I do remember one of the labs chemist testing water samples for mercury and that test was a hard test to conduct. It took more time to conduct than the other tests. It's was not easy testing for trace amounts of mercury. We also tested water samples for cynaide and other contaminates. We did PCB test also. Most all we did was test the water and soils for inorganic pollutants. All the organic tests other than some generic test were sent to California for testing out there at our Organic Testing laboratory. We had labortories located all around the world. Today the lab I worked for is owned by Haliburton. Our lab started out as a geological testing lab and tested mainly core samples from the earth. Then it grew into testing the coal for the local coal companies and the power plants that were purchasing the coal. We tested their coal to document the amount of sulfur in the coal to meet their environemental permit conditions.



Regards,

Moose1am

[idbefishing]

Here is an easy rule to remember: DON'T EAT WILD FISH PERIOD!
Spend a few bucks and go to the grocery store and buy them, farm raised if you want to eat fish bad enough. To me, game fish are my toys so there is no way I'm gonna eat my toys or I won't have any to play with soon. I'm no PETA tree hugger or anything but eat chicken or beef or pork, fish taste awefull anyway.