Salmon lecture notes

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Hey, I'm wanting to post my lecture notes for the students in the class who didn't attend, but after typing them out and rearranging them for a while I've lost all perspective on them. Are these reasonably clear and in an order that makes sense?


Dr. William Lambert's training is in epidemiology, studying patterns of disease over time, and his specialty is environmental epidemiology. Growing up in Los Angeles, he went to UCLA and studied biology and chemistry, then went on for a Masters in Marine Biology. After some years of work in the field, returned to school for a PhD in Epidemiology, combining his interests by specializing in toxicology in the relationship between fish and human health.

Dr. Lambert's work with the Warm Springs tribes calls for finding a cost/benefit balance point. A potential cost of revealing epidemiological dangers is creating fear within a community. Salmon tribes have a higher incident of cancer due to exposure to contaminants in fish, but the nutrition and health benefits from eating the fish far outweigh the health risks of replacing them with western processed foods.

Part of his work with the tribes includes outreach to encourage salmon consumption, along with outreach to encourage traditional, healthier cooking methods that allow fat to drip away from the cooking fish. The fat-soluble chemical contaminants can be reduced by 2/3 by allowing the fat to run off; you do also lose some fatty acids, but retain a great deal, and along with its high protein content, salmon prepared this way remains a healthful food.

In an EPA fish contamination study, all samples of various species were found to be contaminated. Samples were collected from over 100 sites from 1996-1998. EPA standards are based on dominant population consumptions, but salmon tribes eat over 300 pounds per  year on average, while the general population consumption is much, much lower.

In the Willamette Valley, four times as much mercury pollution comes from China as from local industry. However, local polluters have done their damage as well. The rivers have pulluted "hot spots" where pollutants enter the stream; some from past polluters, some from current violators such as the paper mills. There also is a site along Yeon in NW Portland where a DDT manufacturer once existed, and dumped an unknown number of barrels of toxins into the soil, which continue to leach into the river.

Salmon has little mercury and no excessive radionuliatides. However, salmon does have excessive zinc, aluminum, lead, arsenic, DDE, arochlors, chlorinated dioxins, and furans. Levels of all of these were highwer in resident species than they were in salmon, which are a migratory species that spends much of its life at sea. Trout, Lamprey eels, and Sturgeon are all resident species.

Farmed salmon is the most contaminated salmon; it is not only diseased and laden with antibiotics, it is also fed with fish pellets made from smelt caught in mercury-heavy surface water. The flesh of farmed salmon is gray because the fish don't eat the foods they normally would in the wild, so in the weeks before sale they are fed pellets containing dyes that will turn their flesh pink.

Unlike tuna, cod contains little mercury. Tuna forage near  the surface where mercury pollution concentrated. Cod forage deeper in the water, in zones where there is little mercury contamination. Some tuna is more contaminated than other tuna; if buying canned tuna, avoid albacore, or "solid white" tuna, and instead opt for the cheaper "chunk light" tuna, which has half the mercury contamination of albacore.

The Columbia is the second most highly dammed river in the world. The dams prevent the natural flushing of pollutants, causing them to accumulate in the river. The fish who live in the river accumulate the toxins, as well as having their ability to spawn severely curtailed. A major dam impacting the salmon tribes is The Dalles dam, which was built below Horseshoe Falls, a critically important traditional fishing location. The dam put the falls underwater, ending a tradition there, of fishing with nets and scaffolds, which had gone on for thousands of years.

Salmon tribes rely heavily on fishing for food and trade. The Dalles dam alone significantly reduces salmon numbers, and they now number in the tens of thousands rather than in their former millions. The dams, have quite literally stolen, and continue to steal, resources from Native communities.

Army Corps of Engineers sonar imaging shows that despite blasting at Celilo Falls prior to flooding when the gates of the Dalles Dam were closed, the Horseshoe Falls are still intact under the water.

The fact that Native tribes as sovereign nations have the legal clout to force change to protect the salmon and clean the river benefits all of us; another example of  how societies interlock, and oppression of one oppresses all.

[Freeky]

Makes sense to me.

[Golden Applesauce]

Coherent, and I even learned stuff!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Yay! I will post them! Thanks for looking them over.

[East Coast Hustle]

Good stuff. Made sense to me.

[Don Coyote]

Much clearer than any notes I have EVER taken, AND I learned stuff.

[Freeky]

Much clearer than any notes I have EVER taken, AND I learned stuff.

Ditto.  Usually when I take notes, when I look them over before I take a test, I'm all "What the hell is this... 'thr3 x bet nowstndin king wins'??"

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

  thanks!

I did spot a couple of typos and missing words, so I'll fix those and then post it in the morning when I'm less likely to screw shit up.

[Don Coyote]

Much clearer than any notes I have EVER taken, AND I learned stuff.

Ditto.  Usually when I take notes, when I look them over before I take a test, I'm all "What the hell is this... 'thr3 x bet nowstndin king wins'??"

My notes magical turn into squiggles of ink on paper with not meaning the next day.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I missed a lot of info I would have liked to get, like the actual concentrations of contaminants in the fish, and also how much salmon does the dominant population eat?? It seems terribly relevant, yet I didn't catch it.

I seem to have lucked out with note-taking because I have a pretty good ability to listen and write legibly at the same time. Wish I knew shorthand though.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Makes perfect sense, and it's actually engaging, doesn't have that dry class notes quality. I liked it.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Thanks!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Dudes, check it, I took my notes to class and presented them, and the instructor told me to write them into official presentation format and upload them to the class homepage, and she'll give me a whole credit for them!

[Don Coyote]

 

[Freeky]

Dudes, check it, I took my notes to class and presented them, and the instructor told me to write them into official presentation format and upload them to the class homepage, and she'll give me a whole credit for them!

Fuckin' BLAM!