Natural populations of oil-degrading bacteria could help to clean up freshwater rivers and lakes after spills from pipelines and trains, researchers have found after experiments that simulated spills in a Canadian lake. Read more in Great Lakes Now.
Great Lakes
Lingering Chemicals: Legacy pollutants continue to haunt the Great Lakes
Long-lived chemicals that were banned years or even decades ago in the U.S. and Canada are still turning up in the bodies of fish and migrating terns in the Great Lakes, and they continue to affect the health of those threatened birds. Read more in Great Lakes Now.
State of the Lakes: Great Lakes stable, but rollbacks of protection will soon bite
The overall condition of the Great Lakes has been assessed as “fair and unchanging” in the 2019 State of the Great Lakes joint report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Environmental and Climate Change Canada, published on June 3. Read more in Great Lakes Now.
New Canadian law improves habitat protections and adds Indigenous consultation
All fish are created equal, or at least treated equally under Canada’s new fisheries law that came into effect last summer. Under the updated law, fish habitat has gained new protections in Canada. The new version of the law restores protections that were removed by the previous government in 2012 and brings in new requirements […]
Mercury Levels Maintained: Invasive mussels keep mercury levels high in Great Lakes fish
The Great Lakes are much cleaner these days than they were just a few decades ago. Rules to get control of mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, wastewater discharges and the burning of medical waste have led to a steady drop in mercury contamination of the waters and sediments. Despite that progress, the levels of […]