The first CEE 500 seminar of the winter quarter will be presented by Prof Edward Kolodziej on Thursday, Jan 7, at 3:30 pm. We will hear how coho salmon is impacted by tire rubber. Prof. Kolodziej and his coworkers published their findings in the journal Science in December 2020.
Join Zoom Meeting here.
You can read the published findings here. Continuing reading to the lecture abstract.
Roadway Runoff As A Source of Toxic Trace Organic Contaminants To Surface Waters
Edward P. Kolodziej, Zhenyu Tian, Nina Zhao, Kathy Peter, Melissa Gonzalez, Christopher Wu, Ximin Hu, Jen McIntyre, Mike Dodd, Andre Simpson, Nat Scholz, and many other co-authors..
- Center for Urban Waters, Tacoma, Washington
- Division of Sciences and Mathematics, U. of Washington-Tacoma
- Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, U. of Washington-Seattle
In the U.S. Pacific Northwest, a specific species of salmon, (coho salmon, Oncorhynchus kisutch), annually exhibit unexplained acute mortality upon stormwater exposure when adult salmon migrate to urban and near urban creeks to reproduce. By investigating this phenomenon with a portfolio of techniques based upon liquid chromatography-high resolution mass spectrometry, we identified a quinone transformation product of a globally ubiquitous tire rubber antioxidant as the primary causal toxicant for this mortality phenomena. Retrospective analysis of representative roadway runoff and stormwater-impacted creeks of the U.S. West Coast indicated widespread occurrence of the quinone product (<0.3-19 µg/L) at toxic concentrations (LC50 of 0.8±0.16 µg/L). These results reveal unanticipated risks of tire rubber antioxidants to an aquatic species and imply toxicological relevance for widely dissipated tire rubber residues. Additional consideration of the effects of roadway runoff on water quality and sensitive aquatic species is likely merited.