Mercury levels in bluefish caught off the U.S. Atlantic coast dropped more than 40 percent over the past four decades thanks to federal restrictions on coal emissions, according to a new study.
This is good news not only for bluefish but for the entire predator fish population in the Mid-Atlantic. And it's better news for people fond of eating the tasty fish, often served broiled or baked, as it suggests that mercury reductions due to coal-fired plant emissions crackdowns in North America have quickly led to less contamination in marine life.
“This is an important study … this is the type of work that we need to encourage policy makers to support clean-coal technology,” said Katlin Bowman, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California’s Department of Ocean Sciences who was not involved in the study.
Coal-fired plants are big mercury contributors to the atmosphere—where most emission pollution gets dumped—and the ocean, where those pollutants eventually settle.
Efforts over the past few decades to reduce stack emissions has led to quick and dramatic improvements in local air quality. But researchers and regulators assumed any change in ocean conditions and fish mercury contamination would take at least a century to see, given the vastness, said senior author of the study Richard Barber, a professor emeritus of biological oceanography at Duke University.
That assumption appears to be wrong, he said.
“What the EPA decides clearly makes a difference as to how much mercury people consume,” Barber said.
Credit:Coal, bluefish mercury levels drop in tandem
Concentrations decreased 43 percent. The drop is similar to reductions of mercury observed in "atmospheric deposition, riverine input, sea water, freshwater lakes and freshwater fish across northern North America,” Barber and colleagues wrote in the study published this month in the .
A that examined emissions from the top 100 U.S. electric power producers found a 50 percent decrease in mercury emissions from 2000 to 2012.
Schools of fish migrate together in the spring to an area called the Mid-Atlantic Bight, the shelf waters from Nantucket Shoals off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, then head south to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.
They’re voracious eaters, feeding on a wide variety of ocean creatures.
Fish high in the marine food chain such as bluefish are considered the major source of mercury exposure in the United States. Studies have linked pregnant women’s high mercury consumption in seafood to reduced IQs and memories and other neurological impacts in their children.
Among coastal U.S. coastal areas, women along the Atlantic coast were recently shown to have the . Bluefish have long been considered a species with pretty large mercury loads compared to other commercially caught fish.
The study could “potentially impact demand for the product [bluefish],” Montañez said.
Health officials have long struggled with how to balance the benefits and downsides of eating fish.
Last summer in their advice to pregnant and breastfeeding women by recommending consumption of at least 8 ounces of low-mercury fish per week.
bbienkowski@ehn.org
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