SAN DIEGO — Some scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego are looking at how contaminants, like the DDT dump site off Southern California, move through the marine food web. They’re also looking at the relative impacts on coastal recreational fisheries.
The works focuses on kelp bass, Pacific bonito, Pacific mackerel, Pacific sanddab and vermillion rockfish.
Marine biologist and doctoral candidate, Toni Sleugh and other researchers are hoping to understand which characteristics about an individual fish can help predict the amount of contaminants in its tissues.
Sleugh, who is also a student representative at the Center for Marine Biodiversity & Conservation, said they hope to answer questions such as: How does its age, size, position in the food web, preferred habitat type or proximity to sources of contamination change its risk of exposure?
The information could also be integrated into an app being worked on by a team led by doctoral scholar Lillian McGill that aims to help predict DDT levels in fish based on things like location and other data.