![]() Nearly all the coho salmon died right away after being exposed to the polluted water, and up to 42% of the steelhead trout were killed too, though their deaths were delayed by one to two days.įrench and her colleagues tried removing the steelhead from the contaminated water and placing them in clean water, but once they had been exposed to the chemical, they still died. The team investigated how different salmonids react to undiluted, 6PPD-q-loaded, urban stormwater, which is rarely treated before it reaches larger bodies of water. However, new research led by NOAA scientists found 6PPD-q harms other species in the salmonid family besides coho, including steelhead trout. This derivative chemical has proven difficult to identify and study and is even harder to regulate given that the chemicals in tires are proprietary and not disclosed by tire manufacturers. Tire Manufacturers Association, reacts with ozone in the atmosphere, it creates 6PPD-quinone (6PPD-q), a compound that leaches into urban stormwater and watersheds. When 6PPD, which has been used in tires since the 1970s according to the U.S. Last year, a group of Washington researchers pinpointed the cause of these mass fish kills: 6PPD, a chemical added to tires to prevent them from breaking down. “They were very disoriented, even swimming sideways.” The fish lost their sense of direction, gaping their mouths at the water’s surface and splaying their fins. “They’d swim into the banks of the creeks,” French, a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told EHN. When the fish returned to their natal streams to spawn, a point in their life cycle when they are typically in excellent health, they behaved strangely. Since the early 2000s, Barb French observed an unexplainable phenomenon among coho salmon in the Pacific Northwest’s Puget Sound. ![]()
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