Biologist Charles J. Henny reaches into a plastic bag and pulls out eight long, slender structures that look something like old chicken bones. He carefully places them side by side on his desk and then points out the obvious. See how they get smaller and smaller, he says, waving a hand over the lineup. It’s right in correlation with the contaminants. The evidence, thus laid out on the gray metal desktop, seems clear. Otters living in the lower Columbia River area near Portland, Oregon, have a serious problem.
The thin sticks in question are not chicken bones but baculums, the bony part of a river otter’s penis. Those on the left side of the lineup once belonged to otters number 28 and 29, reference animals that were taken from a less contaminated river habitat miles away from the Columbia. At nearly six grams each, they are significantly larger than the remaining six baculums, which were taken from Columbia River otters. These Columbia specimens average just 2.62 grams, with the smallest weighing a measly 1.92 grams. The otters’ testes, says Henny, show a similar range in size, all the way down to one poor otter that didn’t appear to have any testes at all.
To the naked eye, all eight animals had seemed healthy--all were just under a year old and about the same size, around 15 pounds. They had all been caught by fur trappers, who then froze and kept the skinned carcasses until Henny could collect them and bring them back to his office at the National Biological Service in Corvallis, Oregon. When he and a veterinary pathologist examined the otters, the only significant difference they detected--besides the weight and size of the reproductive organs--was in the levels of industrial chemicals and pesticides in the animals’ livers. Time after time, when they analyzed the tissues for pcbs, heptachlor, mirex, or one of several dioxin-like compounds, the relationship was clear: the higher the concentration of chemicals, the smaller the reproductive organs.
It was unbelievable to see those baculums line up the way they did, Henny remarks a short time later as he steers his pickup along the banks of the Columbia River. At river mile 119, a few miles east of downtown Portland and 119 miles inland from where the Columbia finally empties into the Pacific Ocean, he pulls off the highway. This is near the famous spot where Lewis and Clark shot a condor, he says. Looking at the wild, wide Columbia River, whipped with rain under a steel gray sky, it’s easy to imagine the legendary explorers scouting around the river and the dense forests, maybe even trapping a few otters themselves.
Looks can be deceiving. Although the Columbia doesn’t much resemble eastern rivers that fairly scream pollution, with smoking factories lined up toe-to-toe on their banks, it is polluted nonetheless. Heavy metals, dioxins, furans, pcbs, ddt, and other pesticides are all there. Some came from local industry and farm runoff; some were probably transported on air from other parts of the globe. Some of the pollutants exceed allowable levels; some don’t. For some chemicals, permissible levels have not been set. Most of the pollutants tend to accumulate in animal fat, and the otters, eating at the top of the local food chain, seem to be getting plenty.
