[Pharmwaste] Sewage Altering Fish, Study Reports (CA)

[Tenace, Laurie]

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-fish14nov14,0,2580003.story?page=1&tr
ack=tothtml

Sewage Altering Fish, Study Reports
Male bottom-dwellers with female sex characteristics are found near outfall
pipes in waters off Los Angeles and Orange counties.

By Marla Cone, Times Staff Writer


Male fish with female characteristics have been discovered in ocean waters
off Los Angeles and Orange counties, raising concerns that treated sewage
released offshore contains hormone-disrupting compounds that are deforming
the sex organs of marine life.

Scientists around the world have found sexual abnormalities in frogs, fish,
alligators and other wild animals exposed to sewage effluent and industrial
contaminants that mimic estrogens and other hormones. But the latest research
in the waters off Southern California is among the first to find such effects
in ocean creatures.

Eleven male bottom-dwelling fish out of 64 caught between Santa Monica and
Huntington Beach had ovary tissue in their testes. No such sexual defects
were found elsewhere off Southern California, even though fish were collected
from Point Conception to the U.S.-Mexico border. 

Two other studies found other signs of feminized fish in the same ocean
areas. Two-thirds of male turbot and sole caught near Orange County's sewage
outfall had egg-producing proteins. And when males were exposed in a
laboratory to ocean sediment collected off the Palos Verdes Peninsula and
Huntington Beach - where huge volumes of sewage effluent are pumped out to
sea - all of them developed female egg proteins. 

Dan Schlenk, an aquatic ecotoxicologist at UC Riverside who co-wrote two of
the three studies to be reported today at a national conference, said it is
clear that the ocean floor at the sewage outfalls is contaminated with
estrogenic compounds that are feminizing fish. But effects on the overall
health and abundance of fish populations and the rest of the marine ecosystem
are unknown.

"There's definitely estrogenic activity out there; no doubt," Schlenk said.
"But whether it affects populations of the animals is the question we need to
answer."

Every day, nearly 1 billion gallons of treated wastewater from an area that
includes about 9 million people are discharged into deep waters off
Huntington Beach, the Palos Verdes Peninsula and Playa del Rey via three long
undersea pipelines, called outfalls, operated by the two counties and the
city of Los Angeles. 

Sewage effluent contains several dozen chemicals - both natural and man-made
- that can alter animal hormones, environmental scientists say. Women excrete
natural estrogen and man-made forms from birth-control pills, and some
industrial chemicals, pesticides and compounds in household items are
endocrine disruptors, which mimic hormones.

The wastewater is filtered and processed, but many contaminants remain and
settle into ocean sediment, where they are consumed by bottom-feeding
organisms.

Excessive amounts of estrogens or estrogen mimics can create so-called
intersex animals with both male and female genitals. Previously, scientists
have shown that some fish with the altered organs were infertile.

The effect on humans, however, is largely unknown and unproven, though some
studies have linked hormone-mimicking chemicals to reduced sperm counts,
altered genitalia in baby boys and premature puberty in girls.

One study, for example, found that men exposed to agricultural pesticides
were more likely to have defective sperm and low sperm counts than those with
little or no exposure. Another found that phthalates, used in plastics and
beauty products and widely found in people, seemed to alter the reproductive
organs of baby boys.

The estrogenic substances in the effluent are not considered a threat to
people swimming or surfing at Southland beaches. The outfalls discharge into
waters two to seven miles offshore.

Eating fish from the area, however, has long been a health concern because
the pesticide DDT and other toxic substances have contaminated the ocean
floor. Turbot, sole and other bottom-dwelling fish can ingest the
contaminants.

State health officials for years have advised people to limit consumption of
many bottom-feeding fish caught between Malibu and Newport Beach because of
the risk of cancer and neurological and reproductive effects.

No specific chemicals have been implicated in the new studies, but at the
Palos Verdes Peninsula site, some experts suspect that a decades-old, 100-ton
deposit of DDT, which can mimic estrogen in its effect on some animals, could
be responsible. A pesticide plant near Torrance dumped waste into Los Angeles
County sewers for three decades.

The mixed-sex fish were found among two common species of flatfish that feed
in bottom sediments: English sole and hornyhead turbot. The study was
conducted by the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, which
has researched ocean contamination for 35 years using county, state and
federal funds.

Eighty-two male turbot and sole were caught at 30 sites along about 600 miles
of coastline, and the 11 with both male and female organs were found at eight
of 14 sites between Huntington Beach and Port Hueneme, said Doris Vidal, a
researcher at the institute who led the study. 

Bob Horvath, head of technical services at the Los Angeles County Sanitation
Districts, said that although the numbers were small, finding ovary tissue in
males near the sewage outfalls was worrisome and had spurred more research.

Next spring, the water research institute plans to collect about 50 flatfish
from each of five outfalls between Ventura and San Diego and compare them to
fish from a relatively uncontaminated area off Dana Point. Results will be
ready about a year later.

Steve Weisberg, the institute's director, said that the results cannot be
considered definitive because of the small numbers of fish, but that
"certainly this is some very good information, and the first of its kind."

The most intriguing aspect, he said, is that "we did not find any intersex
fish north of Santa Monica Bay or south of Newport Bay, which suggests some
association with the presence of the outfalls and contaminated sediments." He
added that "this is also the most highly urbanized portion of Southern
California," which means contaminants from rivers and runoff might also be
altering the fish.
  
Since the early 1990s, scientists have found altered hormones or deformed sex
organs in alligators in Florida, fish in British rivers, frogs in the
Midwest, polar bears in the Norwegian Arctic and a variety of other
creatures, mostly aquatic ones.

But until now, nearly all the research has been conducted in freshwater
environments, mostly rivers and lakes. Only a few projects have examined
ocean creatures, mostly in British estuaries.

Results of the Southern California studies will be reported at the annual
meeting of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry in
Baltimore.

Scientists today also will report sexually altered fish being found in San
Francisco Bay, Puget Sound and New York Harbor. The Southern California
studies are particularly unusual because the fish were caught in deep water. 

Gary Ankley, branch chief of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's
National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory, called the
feminized fish "a worldwide phenomenon."

"What's being seen in these fish is not physiologically normal," he said.
"But we are still trying to sort out the significance of this to the fish. Is
it just a localized phenomenon, a few individuals around the outfalls that
are really impacted? Or does it impact populations as a whole? That is the
64-million-dollar question."

Scientists are concerned that the feminized fish off Southern California
might be less fertile and cause some species to disappear. But so far, there
have been no declines in the abundance of turbot or sole in the region, even
around the outfalls, Weisberg said. "We don't see any clear evidence of
ecological disruption," he noted.

At the Huntington Beach outfall, UC Riverside environmental toxicologist Mary
Ann Irwin found that 47 of 72 male turbot and sole produced female egg
protein, and the amounts of the protein were higher than in fish caught a few
miles to the north. But she also found that the two species remain
commonplace there, and males outnumber females.

In Schlenk's laboratory, halibut were exposed for one week to sediment
collected at outfalls off Huntington Beach, the Palos Verdes Peninsula and
San Diego, and all the males grew small amounts of female egg protein. The
Palos Verdes fish developed five times more egg protein than fish exposed to
the Huntington Beach sediment and 10 times more than those exposed to
relatively clean sediment collected between the two outfalls.

But to Schlenk's surprise, man-made estrogens, not the more potent natural
ones, were apparently responsible for feminizing the fish. There was no
correlation between natural estrogens and the egg proteins in the fish. 

The research team tested 62 man-made contaminants in the wastewater, but only
one - oxybenzone, used in sunscreens - stood out, and it was unlikely to be
the only culprit. Even widespread chemicals in plastics and detergents called
nonylphenols - found in high doses in Orange County's sediment and implicated
in other studies - were not linked to the amount of egg proteins in the fish,
Schlenk said.



Laurie J. Tenace
Environmental Specialist
Florida Department of Environmental Protection
2600 Blair Stone Road, MS 4555
Tallahassee, Florida 32399-2400
PH: (850) 245-8759
FAX: (850) 245-8811
Laurie.Tenace at dep.state.fl.us
 
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