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Каспинфо сентябрь 2003 |
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Название: ЭКОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ (на англ. яз.) Главные Пункты: * Рыбные мутанты в р. Волга как доказательство экологически неблагополучного состояния водной среды. (09.09.2003) Полный Текст ЭКОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ (на англ. яз.) ЭКОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ (на англ. яз.) *** Russian Environmental Digest -- the world's major English-language press on environmental issues in Russia Volga Now a Health Hazard Moscow News, August 20, 2003 By Valery Kuznetsov Six centuries ago Russians began industrial development, if we can call it that, of Europe's largest river. Later on its entire water area, including the Astrakhan delta, was divided between the tsar, feudal lords, and large monasteries. Ordinary people living along the banks of the mother of all Russian rivers also got a share. While the volume of fishing was enormous - nothing like what it is today - during that time none of the monastery chronicles (and they meticulously recorded every barrel of salted fish) made any mention of a single freak among their catch. Nowadays, however, it has been a rare month over the past decade when a Volga fisherman would not come upon such mutants - eyeless or tailless or with a twisted backbone. Many of them, back in the 1990s, made up the collection of the Togliatti Research Institute of the Volga Basin Ichthyology Laboratory, becoming objects of scientific study. After studying those mutants from the Kuibyshev and Saratov reservoirs, ichthyologists came to the conclusion that Volga water had acquired mutagenic properties, thus increasingly producing mutant fish. That conclusion was immediately classified secret so as not to overburden the Russian people with unnecessary knowledge. The emergence of mutant fish was attributed to chemical pollution. And although it was not recommended to eat such fish, there was apparently nothing terrible about it. The secrecy was short-lived because scientists, despite the ban, eventually raised the alarm. The fish was not simply poisoned but had changed because the habitat had drastically changed, producing ugly monsters. According to Igor Yevlanov, professor at the Ecology Institute and co-author of an illustrated book called Fish Anomalies, there are plenty of spots in the Volga basin where the fish young simply cannot survive. They emerge from the eggs with swollen and deformed heads, displaced internal organs, and even without gills. As medical experts put it, such pathologies are incompatible with life. Ichthyologists refer to zones with mutant young fish as environmental crisis areas. Yet there are even worse places on the Volga - five ecological disaster areas with no river life at all. Meanwhile, a few years ago there was not a single such area on the river. Judging by historical chronicles, our predecessors did not catch just any fish but went for white salmon, beluga, sturgeon, and sterlet. Sheatfish was spurned as it fed on carrion. Chekhon - today's fish of choice - was considered to be not fatty enough. Black-backed herring was rejected as it was believed to induce madness. When a cascade of dams was built last century, obstructing the river from upstream to downstream and turning it in places into a bog, and when industrial giants appeared along its banks, the fish menu changed beyond recognition. The most valuable commercial fish - sturgeon, herring, and salmon - seem to have left the Volga forever. The sturgeon has practically disappeared. Sterlet is crying to be included in the Red Data Book. Even the predators - pickerel, pike perch, and perch - are now few and far between. They dislike the dirty water which is only good enough for the less valuable species that can survive in it, mutating literally by the day if not by the hour. Owing to the heavy pollution, of the 70 types of fish that still spawn in the river, only 20 have commercial value. In recent years, natural spawning grounds in the Kuibyshev and Saratov reservoirs have shrunk eight times to a paltry 450 hectares. So fisheries are gradually leaving the Volga and moving to artificial carp lakes. Visitors are still amazed by the abundant fish market in Samara where vendors shamelessly assure them that all of their products come exclusively from the Volga. The customers have no way of knowing that most of the fish in fact comes from another country - from the Ural river that flows in neighboring Kazakhstan. But nature abhors a vacuum. So the place of disappearing or extinct Volga fish is being taken by new arrivals. About two years ago, Igor Yevlanov included in his collection a creature, obtained from a fisherman he knew, which did not even remotely resemble the local underwater fauna: the pinagore, a spiky and sinister-looking native of the North and Barents Seas. The appearance of oceanic fish in the Volga became not so much a sensation as a puzzle. How could it possibly have made it to the mid-Volga? Neither is there an answer to another mystery: How could flatfish, which lives in the Caspian Sea, thousands of kilometers away, have found its way to the Samara banks? True, what ichthyologists find really amazing is the fish's ability to survive in fresh water rather than the distances it appears to have covered. Mutation again? No scientist today is in a position to say how the present condition of Volga water will affect the life not only of the fish but also of the local population tomorrow. The problem is not only that mutation has not been studied well enough on the genetic level, but that it is not being studied at all. In the last seven years no funding has been provided to the relevant research programs. The data that researchers use today go back to 1997 at best. During this time a lot of water has flown down the Volga - and become heavily polluted. According to the Vod-Geo research institute, 300,000 tonnes of organic substances and 60,000 tonnes of oil products are dumped into the river by Volga towns every year. About 120,000 tonnes of nitrogen fertilizer gets into the water from rural areas. Add to this another seven million tonnes of solid matter that is first emitted into the atmosphere of the Volga basin and then gets into the ground and water with precipitation. Also include the sediment that has for decades been polluting the water with decaying matter. Meanwhile, water from the Volga basin in some form or other is used by approximately 40 percent of the country's population for drinking. Incidentally, the Japanese, who take a close interest in all sorts of waste, have on the highest possible level repeatedly offered to clear the Volga of all this sediment. They are ready to accept everything that they will find on the river bed as payment for their effort. Sure, there are hundreds of thousands of tonnes of ferrous and non-ferrous scrap metal and as much sunken timber lying on the Volga bed. But we are unlikely to get down to that even in the distant future. So it would be a good idea to give all these deposits to the Japanese in exchange for pure Volga water. Of course the water is purified in large cities. But scientists believe that this purification - including chlorination or ozonization or even boiling - does not have any effect on mutagenic organisms. Almost 10 years ago the Russian government adopted a federal program called Volga Revival. But it did not provide so much as a red cent to translate the program into reality. As the mutation mechanism is essentially unknown, it could well be that the local joke about a man showing his two-square-headed son the place where the great Russian river once flowed is not at all a joke but a chilling prediction of the future. Yet while there apparently is still a long way to go before fish, and then probably man himself, mutates into an altogether different species, hitherto unseen Volga mutants, including some very dangerous parasites, have already approached the human habitat. A worm causing a new form of disease among humans has just been discovered in the Volga water. And although this helminth has a nice-sounding double female name - melissia et tania - a close encounter with it spells no end of trouble. Formerly only three forms of helminthiasis were known - hepatic, intestinal, and pulmonary. The new helminth gets into the human organism with ingested fish, and then moves via the circulatory system to the skin that becomes a cozy home, and breeding grounds, for the parasite. By a quirk, a girl named Tania, who loved beer with dried salty fish, was the first to fall victim to this helminth. All the indications are that the drying and salting process failed to kill the worm that resided in the fish. At present the helminth has affected virtually the entire carp population in downstream Volga waters. Scientists point out that the Middle Volga may be a little too cold for it. Yet recent research shows that various river organisms that used to live only in warm water areas suddenly appear in more northerly parts of the river, and are doing pretty well there. Unfortunately, this applies only to those species of the fauna that do not bring any good, while useful aquatic organisms are far more conservative and not only are not going to migrate but are even shrinking on their home turf. So the outlook for the foreseeable future is that even our local fish will end up infected with the parasite that is impervious to any known drugs. People have brought it on themselves. After all, it was as a result of their efforts that the great Russian river was turned into a cascade of enclosed ponds whose water contains not only virtually all elements of the Periodic Table but also all microbes and bacteria that can cause both known and unknown diseases. |