Tiny microplastics have been found deep in the ocean, in Arctic snow and Antarctic ice, in shellfish, table salt, drinking water and beer, according to, as well as floating in the air and falling in rain - basically everywhere. The rest of it is still loose in our world - and its effect is enough to make your hair stand on end. Of the more than eight billion tons of plastic created since 1950, only nine percent was recycled. Plastics don’t decompose or “go away.” They just fracture into smaller and smaller smithereens - small enough to slip through the blood-brain barrier in humans and other mammals, with effects that still are not understood.
Herald journal series#
Nature at Risk is a series published by Brodhead Watershed Association. Humans overfishing to meet the demand for caviar and causing habitat loss, often by dams, are the main culprits.įind out what is being done! Check out the World Wide Fund for Nature “Sturgeon Strategy” at Sturgeons are among the most endangered group of species on Earth. As a result, many fish populations have declined.” In some cases, fewer than one-half of one-percent of historic fish populations remain. Other rivers - and their fish - have not been so lucky.Īccording to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “in the United States, more than 2 million dams and other barriers block fish from migrating upstream. The proposed Tocks Island Dam was never built, thanks to unstinting and unrelenting work by local people and organizations led by Nancy Shukaitis. The Atlantic sturgeon was spared one human-caused negative impact: a dam proposed for the Delaware River. Fifteen or more years later, they return to their home river when they are old enough to reproduce. After living and growing in the freshwater river where they were born, juveniles head downstream to the sea. One of many subspecies of sturgeons, the Atlantic sturgeon is large, up to 6 feet long and 150 pounds, and long-lived, up to 50 years or more. Because bony plates cover its body, the Atlantic sturgeon is safe from most predators, but not from human actions. Over-harvesting and other human impacts have shrunk the Delaware’s adult spawning population to fewer than 300. More than 3 million pounds of sturgeon were taken from the River over just five years in the 1890s. The enormous abundance of the native Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrhynchus) is arguably one of the reasons human encampments along the Delaware River go back thousands of years.įast-forward to the 1800s, when the Delaware was known as the “caviar capital of North America.” An estimated 180,000 Atlantic sturgeon females spawned in the Delaware. The flesh and eggs of this huge, ancient, bony fish were likely staple food for the indigenous Lenni Lenape in our area. Sturgeons have existed for 200 million years.
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