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A Purdue University research project focuses on great blue herons to determine how industrial pollutants affect Indiana wildlife. (Photo by Tom Campbell) |
Marisol Sepúlveda is going to the tops of trees to get to the bottom of her questions about pollutants in Indiana's soil and water.
Sepúlveda, assistant professor of forestry and natural resources, studies how environmental contamination affects fish and wildlife. One of her current projects, supported by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management and the Environmental Protection Agency, looks at how industrial pollutants, such as mercury and PCBs, affect Indiana's wildlife.
She and a team of forestry and natural resources students spent last spring scaling sycamore trees in northern Indiana to harvest eggs from great blue herons, large fish-eating birds and top predators in many of Indiana's aquatic ecosystems.
Pollutants like PCBs and pesticides are stored in body fat and accumulate in the bodies of organisms that live in contaminated areas. Sepúlveda wants to know how this contamination affects great blue herons' reproductive success and their ability to produce healthy offspring.
"If a mother heron accumulates enough of these pollutants in her body, she will pass some of it along to the yolk when she lays her eggs," she says. "This exposes the embryos to these pollutants at a very early stage in development. It could mean they'll be smaller or have malformations when they hatch and might not make it to adulthood."
Sepúlveda hopes her studies will shed light on how this exposure may affect developing embryos and, ultimately, heron populations statewide. The results of her study will help the state plan future remediation efforts in the Grand Calumet River basin in northern Indiana and other sites across the state.
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