On the toxic trail
By Amy Geiszler-Jones
 Photos by Paul Talley |
The fact that the Arkansas River is one of Kansas’ dirtiest rivers is a good and bad thing for Mike Lydy.
"In environmental toxicology, you don’t want to be in a pristine area," says Lydy, an associate professor in biological sciences, "so it’s not a major setback for me to be in an area with problems."
As someone who has enjoyed one of nature’s resources since childhood, he finds it unfortunate that it’s as dirty as it is.
"I feel out of place if I’m not near water, but I’d like to have water I can actually get in," says Lydy, who in the 1980s did research on Ohio’s Cuyahoga River, which was so polluted then that it actually caught on fire.
Recently the Kansas Department of Health and Environment issued a warning that the Arkansas River is unsafe for recreational activities like boating, swimming, wading and water skiing. The KDHE is under a court order to clean up the river.
Since joining the WSU faculty in 1995, Lydy has been doing research involving the Arkansas and Little Arkansas rivers, working on various state and federal grants exceeding more than $1 million.
The fact that the river is so dirty is no surprise to Lydy, who spent nearly every day last summer around and in the rivers working on one project.
"It’s not just the fecal coliform bacteria that the city is worried about right now," says Lydy. "We have problems that you don’t hear about with organochlorine insecticides, and they’re much longer lived. Those fecal coliforms go in and out of the system pretty quickly."
Fecal coliform bacteria come from such sources as septic tanks, leaking sewer pipes, and waste from livestock, wildlife and pets.
The insecticide DDT, its metabolite form (when it’s broken down) known as DDE, and chlordane are among the toxic compounds known as organochlorines.
"DDT was actually banned in 1972, but we still see residues of its metabolites to this day," he says. "Chlordane was sprayed around the foundations of homes to control termites. When it seeps down into the water table, your sump pump picks it up and transports it to the sewage treatment plant or it goes into the storm water sewers."
During the WSU-funded project he and graduate student Holly Eaton did last summer on the Arkansas and Little Arkansas rivers, they found residue of those chemicals in the carp and sediment samples they gathered from 20 sites. They were particularly interested in seeing if there were differences between samples from urban and agricultural areas.
There wasn’t, they found.
 Mike Lydy electrofishes by placing a tote barge into the Arkansas River near the sewage treatment plant. The tote barge sends a low amount of electrical current into the water, which shocks the fish to bring them to the surface so they can be netted and tested for toxins. |
The findings also confirm for Lydy that it’s not just farmers who are responsible for our dirty waters.
"Everyone plays a role," he says. Pets that leave waste in yards or parks, homeowners who fertilize their lawns, crews who dump rock salt to prevent icy roads and golf courses that apply nutrients and chemicals to maintain their turf are just some of the contributors in urban areas. Such polluters are known as non-point source pollution, because it’s hard to pinpoint where it’s coming from.
"We’ve regulated the industries (known as point source pollution), pretty well. What we’ve not regulated is everybody doing things that have a cumulative effect over time."
One of his projects, funded by the KDHE, is looking at the non-point source pollution impact of various urban land uses, such as golf courses, parks, playfields and runoff from people’s yards.
"All these sites eventually lead into our public waters — the Arkansas River and this watershed, which in turn goes into Oklahoma," says Nate Davis, a graduate student working on the project. "They can also affect groundwater. Wichita gets about 40 percent of its drinking water from groundwater."
As the three-year project enters its last year, Davis is researching the effectiveness of measures to improve water quality in the ponds at WSU’s golf course.
Lydy is also working on a project, started in 1997 and funded through the Environmental Protection Agency/EPSCoR, in which he’s investigating mixtures of pesticides in the rivers.
He’s particularly interested in what happens when the pesticide atrazine, which is used on crops and is fairly harmless to aquatic life on its own, combines with organophosphates, called OPs. The latter are the kinds of chemicals — diazinon, malathion, methyl-parathion and chlorpyrifos — you find on a shelf in Wal-Mart or your local nursery that will kill grubs, spider mites and other garden insects. They are highly toxic substances.
"What we found is really interesting," he says of his early findings. "If you mix the atrazine with the OPs, it increases the toxicity of the OPs two- to four-fold."
For some reason, atrazine forces the metabolism of these already very toxic chemicals into high gear.
"It brings up the whole issue of mixtures in the environment. We don’t have a very good handle on individual compounds, but when you put them in a soup, that makes it much more difficult to determine what’s going on."
As this project continues, he’ll be trying to find the reason behind this and then look at the long-term effects of such mixtures.
