Old specimens, fresh answers
Research conducted by a Harvard undergraduate has traced the rise of mercury pollution in endangered seabirds and highlighted the importance of museum collections as a time capsule concerning conditions on Earth over the past century. The research, by Anh-Thu Elaine Vo ’08, now a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, details mercury levels in the feathers of endangered black-footed albatrosses from 1880 to 2002, showing increased levels after World War II and after 1990, when Asian industrialization is believed to have increased emissions. Similar studies have documented the rise of environmental mercury levels in other seas, including the Atlantic and the North Sea, but this is the first to do so for the Pacific. Mercury is known as a highly toxic pollutant that can have detrimental effects on the environment. It can become particularly toxic for top predators in a food web, because the consumption of creatures with lower mercury...
