Wildlife and Domestic Animal Issues

Wildlife Issues

Selenium contamination caused massive deaths and deformities of water fowl in California's Central Valley during the 1980s, after which the US Environmental Protection Agency established a water-based standard for selenium of 5 parts per billion.

EPA has now proposed relaxing the selenium standard from 5 parts per billion in water to 7.9 parts per million in fish, in order to accommodate the concerns of mining and other industries that claim the existing standard is unnecessarily restrictive and economically burdensome. This EPA initiative has been strongly opposed by federal scientists at the US Fish & Wildlife Service, the US Geological Survey and other agencies, who say that the proposed relaxation in the EPA standard for selenium in water would have a devastating effect on fish and wildlife. See A.D. Lemly, "Symptoms and Implicatoins of Selenium Toxicity in Fish. The Belews Late Case Example" (PDF, 1.2Mb), Aquatic Toxicology, Vol. 57 (2002), pages 39-49

Federal biologist Joseph Skorupa of the Fish & Wildlife Service, who has investigated selenium poisoning for more than 20 years, reported that EPA research on the issue is "fatally flawed" and that the relaxed standard of 7.9 parts per million would mean that more than 50 percent of bird eggs would fail to hatch.