Catching and eating fish is a way of life for many people around the Great Lakes and connecting St. Lawrence River, but decades of industrial pollution have made it unsafe to eat too many, too often. The advice about how many and how often can vary wildly depending on which jurisdiction, even though the fish […]
pollution
Slippery coating could help reduce microplastic shedding from clothes
Researchers at the University of Toronto have developed a way to help reduce one of the biggest sources of the plastic pollution choking our oceans: not single-use straws or bags, but tiny fibres shed from synthetic fabrics like polyester and nylon. Read more in CIC News.
Some banned pesticides fade from Great Lakes air, while others persist
Two recently banned pesticides have all but disappeared from the atmosphere around the Great Lakes, while others phased out decades ago are still hanging around. Read more in Great Lakes Now.
Mercury in fish may not be as bad as we thought
Mercury, especially in its organic methylmercury form, is well known to cause severe problems in the brain – famously, Alice in Wonderland’s Mad Hatter is thought to be a victim of mercury poisoning. Because mercury in the environment – both from natural sources and from pollution – can find its way into the food we […]
Study: Fish can recover from mercury pollution faster than thought
Mercury pollution remains a problem in many parts of the Great Lakes, but new research from Canada’s Experimental Lakes Area in northern Ontario shows that efforts to reduce the amount of mercury going into a lake can have quick and dramatic effects on the levels of the pollutant in fish populations. Read more in Great Lakes […]
Bacteria Cleanup: Should we let nature clean up oil spills?
Natural populations of oil-degrading bacteria could help to clean up freshwater rivers and lakes after spills from pipelines and trains, researchers have found after experiments that simulated spills in a Canadian lake. Read more in Great Lakes Now.
Oil Spills’ Overlooked Victims: Water Insects
New research shows how oil spills and their cleanup harm water striders, raising questions about the broader ecological impacts of even small spills. The dangers of freshwater oil spills to fish and birds are well known, but what about the other creatures, like insects, that live in or on rivers and lakes? Tyler Black, a […]
Lingering Chemicals: Legacy pollutants continue to haunt the Great Lakes
Long-lived chemicals that were banned years or even decades ago in the U.S. and Canada are still turning up in the bodies of fish and migrating terns in the Great Lakes, and they continue to affect the health of those threatened birds. Read more in Great Lakes Now.
What Tear Gas Does to Fish
Previous work shows the main ingredient in tear gas can kill fish—but little else is known about how riot control agents affect the environment. Juniper Simonis was radicalized on July 10, 2020, in Portland, Oregon. That’s the date, Simonis says, that—while they were chalking the property line of a federal building to show protesters where […]
State of the Lakes: Great Lakes stable, but rollbacks of protection will soon bite
The overall condition of the Great Lakes has been assessed as “fair and unchanging” in the 2019 State of the Great Lakes joint report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Environmental and Climate Change Canada, published on June 3. Read more in Great Lakes Now.