Cane-field burning loaded Everglades fish with mercury concentrated up the food chain

Evidence

Because the Everglades function like kidneys, most of the toxins that are in the larger ecosystem end up in the Everglades eventually. More pollution and less Everglades means less filtering, and the system becomes a toxic sink. In 1989, federal and state scientists discovered that freshwater fish in the Everglades had high levels of mercury, largely, they surmised, from the post-harvest burning of the cane fields. Raccoons, alligators, and panthers in the area are also contaminated with large amounts of mercury. … High up on the food chain, the big cats and the big crocodiles are the first to go from pollution. In mid-1989, a Florida panther was found dead in the Everglades. Liver samples from the cat found 110 ppm of mercury, indicating that mercury poisoning may have been the cause of death. This particular panther frequented the Shark River Slough, where deer were scarce, but likely was living on raccoons and alligators, which are even higher up on the food chain. In 1991, the last two female panthers living in the Everglades National Park died. — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations, 175

Categorization

• XREF: Direct parallel to Akwesasne breast-milk chapter — industrial pollution biomagnifying into the bodies of people and their totem animals. — connects to: Wetlands function as the kidneys that filter whole ecosystems — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 164; Ocean acidification and overfishing threaten the marine food chain — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2785
• ADDENDUM: Biomagnification of mercury into apex predators reads as a systems-infrastructure failure of the same kind as the tree/ecosystem cases.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source

Broader Connections

• Ocean acidification and overfishing threaten the marine food chain #complicates (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2785