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Bird-poisoning study causes ruffle

Researchers say wading birds in the Everglades will benefit. Critics call the $400,000 experiment worthless.

By CRAIG PITTMAN
Published May 7, 2006

The purpose: Test the effects of low doses of mercury on them over the next five years, in hopes of protecting the 100,000 wading birds still coping with mercury pollution in the Everglades.

"Ultimately, what we're after is to develop some kind of a number for mercury exposure where we can be sure there are not any detrimental effects," said Peter Frederick, the University of Florida wildlife ecology professor leading the ibis study.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals objects to the experiment, calling it "a glaring misuse of taxpayer dollars that will unnecessarily subject birds to years of stress, illness, and possibly death while failing to offer any environmental protections."

PETA, known for mounting provocative campaigns against experiments on animals, the consumption of meat and the wearing of furs, has urged the state Department of Environmental Protection to stop paying for Frederick's research.

The DEP is sticking by the $400,000 experiment. In a letter to PETA this month, DEP official Edwin Conklin defended it as crucial to saving the Everglades - and not that bad for the ibises, which he said "are generally exposed to no more mercury than they would acquire in the Everglades."

In the end, Conklin contended in the April 13 letter, the experiment will lead to tougher regulations that will end up saving lots of other birds.

"There is a need to quantify the safe level of mercury for wading birds to set a regulatory target to protect them," wrote Conklin, the agency's director of resource assessment and management.

But state officials could not name another instance where they have regulated toxic contaminants like mercury based on how much it harms wildlife. They have always regulated toxins based on what level harms humans, and for mercury, that's already known.

To PETA, that means the experiment is pointless.

"What I find most galling in this whole affair is the attempt to portray these experiments as leading to further protection of the environment," said PETA's regulatory division director, Jessica Sandler. "The fact is that no matter what the results of the testing are, they won't be used to change anything."

DEP's mercury research coordinator, Tom Atkeson, said he hopes the ibis experiment will lead to changes in the regulation of mercury - though he conceded he doesn't know how.

"If the information were good and compelling, one would hope that the policy and regulation would follow," Atkeson said.

State officials discovered in 1989 that the waters of the Everglades were polluted with mercury, which can cause abnormal development, poor coordination, paralysis and death.

Scientists think the mercury settled in the water from air pollution. They have found it in fish, raccoons, alligators, wading birds, even Florida panthers.

Frederick and some colleagues spent 1994 to 2000 pulling feathers from great egret nestlings in the Everglades to test them for mercury poisoning. They found the mercury level in the birds dropped nearly 70 percent during that time.

Frederick and his colleagues theorized that it was probably because of a crackdown by state officials on mercury emissions from South Florida's municipal waste and medical waste incinerators.

Once the state required more stringent pollution controls, mercury emissions measured in South Florida dropped by 93 percent between 1991 and 2000.

While the mercury level dropped, Frederick noted, the wading bird population boomed.

Wading birds had declined in the Everglades by 90 percent over 50 years, a sign of how dysfunctional the River of Grass had become. But in the late 1990s the population more than doubled.

Frederick and others wondered whether the bird boom was because of the drop in mercury contamination. They decided to test their theory with the ibises.

Of the 16 species of wading birds that live in the Everglades, the white ibis is the most common. It uses its slender, curved beak to probe in mud and swamps in search of crayfish, frogs and other prey.

On a trip to the Everglades last spring, Frederick captured more than 170 that had not yet learned to fly and brought them to Gainesville, to a new taxpayer-funded $150,000 aviary, which at 13,000 square feet is one of the largest in the nation.

Despite getting a new home, about two dozen soon died because they had been starving in the wild, Frederick said. So to replace them, and even out the gender balance, Frederick traveled north to the Lake City area and captured about 20 female ibises, he said.

There are now about 160 ibises in the aviary, split into four equal groups. Three are fed pellets that contain varying amounts of mercury, none more than 0.3 parts per million, which is below the level that's unsafe for human consumption. The fourth, the control, gets pellets with no mercury.

Twice a year the researchers pull feathers from the birds and check how much mercury has accumulated in their bodies.

Although the experiment is only a year old, it's already showing results, Frederick said. All of the birds getting mercury, no matter what the amount, "showed a decrease in appetite."

The ibises have nine nests with eggs, raising Frederick's hopes that they will soon see what effect the varying mercury levels have on the hatchlings.

He said PETA's concerns are off-base. "At these low doses there is no evidence that it's causing pain and suffering," he said. "We're not going to have debilitated birds walking around in a jerky way."

The DEP sees the study as crucial to aiding Everglades restoration, according to agency spokesman Anthony DeLuise.

"The DEP will use the results of the study to determine concentrations of mercury allowable for wildlife systems and to improve the management of this pollutant," he said in an e-mail.

Because Frederick's ibises are getting smaller doses of mercury than the level considered unsafe for people, any new regulation based on the study would likely be more stringent than that.

"So we're going to treat birds better than we treat people?" joked David Guest, a former assistant attorney general who now heads the Earthjustice environmental law group in Florida. "Can I have myself reclassified as a canary?"

Some environmental activists questioned whether the DEP would ever regulate toxic pollution based on the harm to wildlife, given its track record.

"They had millions of dollars worth of mercury data on fish that they collected in the early 1990s and they threw that all away" when the DEP formulated recent water-pollution limits that environmentalists said were too lenient, said Linda Young of the Clean Water Network.

For PETA the issue is more basic. PETA's mission statement says simply: "Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on or use for entertainment."

The organization is not shy about using hyperbole to draw attention to its crusades. A recent ad campaign that juxtaposed images of lynchings of black men with pictures of cow carcasses hanging in a slaughterhouse drew strong objections from civil rights groups.

PETA got wind of the ibis experiment four months ago when a member sent in an Associated Press story about the new aviary, Sandler said.

"This just struck me as a crazy academic exercise," she said. Once the ibis experiment is over, she asked, what comes next?

"The Everglades are a very diverse ecology - are they going to test every species?" she asked. (DeLuise said the agency "does not have any studies scheduled at this time on the effects of mercury on larger species.")

And when PETA found out how much money DEP was spending, it made even less sense, she said. "It's your tax money going for this," she said.

To DEP officials, that's actually a sign of how crucial the research is to the Everglades. One of the key tests of whether the $10-billion restoration program is working is whether the wading bird population is bouncing back, DeLuise said.

"I would challenge anyone who understands the magnitude of what the department is trying to achieve with this study, and its importance to the overall restoration effort, to find fault with our commitment," he wrote in an e-mail.

Frederick said, "PETA can do a lot of good in a lot of areas, but I don't think this is one of them. I'm concerned about animal welfare, too - I'm concerned about all those animals out there that are getting dosed with mercury 24-7. ... It's a moral obligation to find out how low we can go."

[Last modified May 7, 2006, 22:08:02]