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Don't nobody tell AOC and Hiden Biden!

SEATTLE -- First they circle. Then they gasp at the surface of the water. Soon they can’t swim. Then they die.

For decades now, scientists have known something was killing beautiful, adult coho salmon as soon as they hit Seattle’s urban waters, ready to spawn. They had escaped the orcas, the fishermen, traveled thousands of miles, only to be mysteriously killed as soon as they finally reached home.

In a breakthrough paper published in the Dec. 3 issue of Science, a team of researchers revealed the culprit behind the deaths of coho in an estimated 40% of the Puget Sound area — a killer so lethal it takes out 40 to 90% of returning coho to some urban streams before they spawn. It is a killer hidden in plain sight.

Tires.

More specifically, a single chemical, 6PPD-quinone, derived from a preservative that helps tires last longer.

Through painstaking analysis and building on years of prior research, the team, including researchers from the Center for Urban Waters in Tacoma, the University of Washington and Washington State University, isolated the killer from a witch’s brew of some 2,000 chemicals in roadway runoff.

The chemical is a globally common tire rubber antioxidant. But when it does its job, interacting with ozone in the atmosphere, the chemical transforms to a substance that is highly toxic to coho.

Bound up in the rubber, this chemical taints tire-wear particles shed by tires onto roads. The tire dust is in roadway runoff that seeps, trickles and pours into water bodies, including urban streams, every time it rains. The more traffic on the road, the higher the dose.

Coho salmon, returning with the first fall rains, take the hit. They usually die within hours.

The pollutant is particularly problematic for waters near busy roads. Translation: most of central Puget Sound and its sprawl. Ironically, the millions of dollars spent to make these areas more salmon friendly and boost fish populations have created ecological traps for coho coming back to toxic waters.

Some of the scientists who published the paper were both exhilarated at the breakthrough and concerned by the findings.

“I find it incredibly sad to watch the adults when they are sick,” said co-senior author on the paper, Edward Kolodziej, an associate professor in both the UW Tacoma Division of Sciences & Mathematics and the UW Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering.

Every fall he’d make a visit to Longfellow Creek in West Seattle and mourn what he saw.

“When you see a fish in the field, and know something is happening that is not understood, you just have to take that very seriously. ... It was just so evident to everyone we were working on a real problem.”

It was the cross-disciplinary approach of bringing together experts in the biology and chemistry of the problem that finally cracked the mystery. Dogged determination helped, too.

Lead author Zhenyu Tian, a research scientist at the Center for Urban Waters at UW Tacoma said there were times when he wondered if they would ever figure out just what chemical was the killer.

He finally had the idea it might be not the tire itself but something related to it — and hit on the preservative. They figured out that the preservative, 6PPD, goes through an environmental transformation that turns it into 6PPD-quinone — a coho killer.

“This is the smoking gun. You go through all the lines of evidence and it lines up.”

Tian modestly makes it sound easier than it was, Kolodziej said. “It looks so nice and tidy in the paper. They went above and beyond,” he said of Tian and Jenifer McIntyre, an assistant professor at WSU’s School of the Environment.

“If you are a scientist, you are among the people most familiar with failure; you have to be so comfortable with not succeeding,” Kolodziej said. After all, most research is a product of figuring out what doesn’t work, what doesn’t answer the question pursued, Kolodziej said. “It is slow and difficult and positive reinforcement is rare,” he said of scientific research. “You have to trust the scientific process. You put in the work, like so many things in life, it is about putting in the work. "

It has taken decades to solve this problem, noted McIntyre, who is based in Puyallup and is among scientists who have been sleuthing out the coho killer for years.

Nat Scholz of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle was the lead author in a 2011 paper with McIntyre and other authors that showed that coho pre-spawn mortality was routine in urban streams. They joined with other scientists who documented that bio-filtration through soil solves the problem, purifying the water.

Good to know, but tough at scale — given how big the problem turned out to be. Scholz and another team of co-authors led by Blake Feist at NOAA’s Northwest Science Center documented in their 2017 paper the link to traffic volume on roads and even mapped the scope of the problem across an estimated 40% of Puget Sound country. In 2018, McInyre, Scholz, Kolodziej and other scientists linked the coho deaths to tire wear particles in roadway runoff.

With 3.1 billion tires globally produced annually for more than 1.4 billion vehicles, tire-wear particles are a daunting pollution problem. The preservative 6PPD appears to be used in all tires, the scientists noted in the most recent paper, and tire-wear particles are likely present in creeks near busy roads across the world.

There also is not today a salmon-safe tire on the market, or treatment for tires to make tires salmon-safe. Any vehicle is implicated, whether gasoline-powered or electric, privately owned or transit. If it’s got a tire, and it moves on a road, it’s part of the problem.

Dan Kent is executive director of Salmon Safe, a nonprofit that certifies products made in a manner that is better for salmon. He sees a ripe target and ready market for salmon-safe tires. “We’re definitely interested, we have just been waiting for these findings.”




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Oh yeah- better get your tires now! Start the run on them early.

gonna be a run on them..............like TP.

Honestly though, it's an interesting deal. Coho because they're the earliest to return to the streams, just as the rains are getting heavy enough to produce more runoff?

I think there's some pink runs in the Sound, maybe not near the major population centers? Generally, a pollutant like the one mentioned is not species specific, if it affects on salmonid it would likely affect others. Makes me wonder if there are any resident rainbows or cutthroat there?

Perhaps easier to address the runoff with some biofilter type traps rather than have the tire formulations changed just for one area of the West?

Perhaps there needs to be more research on other species in other locations this chemical might be affecting?

As per usual, research leads to the need for more research?

Damn. Sad but not surprising. I pulled off the I 5 between Bellingham and Seattle somewhere, fairly sparse developed area with a fair bit of trees that looked like a good spot cause I needed to take a wiz. Turned around on the side road and parked by a clump of forest facing the on ramp. Walked in a few steps out of sight to relieve myself. Started looking around and there was a small stream through trees maybe a 2 foot culvert worth of water, almost completely plugged with plastic bottles the odd tire and other garbage. Was thinking to myself prime little coho stream so close to the sound how the hey are they supposed to swim through all that schit.

Not pickin on just the Puget sound area. This scene repeats itself all over including up here near the city, pisses me off bigly. I've done some fish enhancement work so my brain goes there, its pretty simple keep the water quality decent and garbage and erosion out. Its not that hard if there weren't so many that don't give a flying fuqk about throwing garbage where ever its easy and often down a bank into the crick is easiest.

I'm thinking hiden Biden is going to play hide the salami with AOC...

Interesting article that sheds some light on the massive die-offs we see, usually during the first monsoons of October. We knew that it was roadway runoff but as the article states there are 2,000 + potential chemical culprits.

Despite the billions upon billions of dollars spent trying to mitigate the impacts of dams, sea lions <see dams>, residential growth, over-fishing, poor ocean conditions, etc fishing continues to decline on the west coast.

While hatcheries continue to crank out cookie cutter fish and wild genetics are lost we’ll continue to fight other user groups and point fingers rather than admit what we’ve known all along, we are their biggest threat. Big runs of big fish (salmon) are not compatible with large populations of humans. That’s why the best runs today are those that are remote and even that is dwindling.

We spend untold amounts on identifying the chemical culprit all the while we continue to degrade the habitat, silt the spawning beds and turn the waters into a Petri dish of Dow and Monsanto. There is an absolute, observable correlation between growth and death, on the smallest scale up to entire habitats or ecosystems.

Unfettered population growth eh?

Try working in the profession and having the children of old timers tell you " My granddad used to pitchfork them out of the gravel bars when he settled this place, now I have to have a punchcard and can take one a day".

They never seem to figure there was only 3000' people in the watershed when granddaddy was busy with his pitchfork.