Anyone who’s flown across Canada, coast to coast, knows the country is blanketed in lakes and rivers. To a greater or lesser extent, like everywhere else on planet Earth, Canadian surface waters contain chemically pollutants.
Industrial effluents are the major source, right?
Think again. The largest source of surface water pollution in Canada are domestic sinks and toilet bowls, and storm waters draining across urban streets and green spaces, all flushing into municipal wastewater plants.
Those treatment plants do their best to remove organic pollutants, but others remain. Among these, thousands of compounds contained in household detergents, cleansers, and personal care products, partially metabolized pharmaceutical products, and vast quantities of microplastics from washing machines and dryers.
More exotic toxins are there too, including polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) — those ‘forever chemicals’, virtually impossible to break down, biologically — and mercury, naturally present in soils, and generated through the burning of fossil fuels.
Dr. Karen Kidd has spent her career studying the effects toxic contaminants have on fish and tiny invertebrates living in Canadian lakes and rivers. Kidd is a Professor in the Department of Biology at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario.
Orb-weaving spiders inhabiting the riparian edge of those rivers are a powerful research tool in the Kidd lab.
Riparian arachnids dine on insects emerging from surface waters, and on their larvae. Chemical contaminants inside those aquatic insects appear to alter the composition of microbial communities living inside their terrestrial spider predators — a complex microbial mix that can be monitored.
Like the human microbiome, spider endosymbionts like Wohlbachia know no other home, and help spiders out.
They also help ecotoxicologists monitor the presence and impact of freshwater contaminants.
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The GPM paid a visit to the Kidd lab, to learn more about how the microbiomes of tetragnathid (‘four-jawed’) spiders are being used to monitor river pollution.
Karen Kidd has been Jarislowsky Chair of Environment and Health at McMaster University since 2017. Before that, she was a Canada Research Chair on the Chemical Contamination of Food Webs at the University of New Brunswick, and a Research Scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Dr. Milena Esser is a postdoctoral fellow in Karen Kidd’s lab, and Colleen Wardlaw is a Ph.D. candidate.
Listen to our conversation in today’s edition of the GPM. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Listen to our complete conversation here:
With all eyes fixed on the genocidal war Israel-USA has been prosecuting in Gaza since October 2017, Israel has been steadily consolidating its unlawful colonization and de facto annexation of the Palestinian West Bank.
Since the Gaza genocide began, Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers have been waging a parallel campaign of terror up and down the Palestinian West Bank. Ten thousand indigenous Bedouins have been displaced from their communities in the fertile Jordan Valley. Another 30,000 have been forced from their homes in the so-called ‘refugee camps’ of Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams.
With the full support of Israeli soldiers and police (in and out of uniform), Jewish settlers have forcibly displaced the entire Bedouin population between Ramallah and the Jordan Valley. Over sixty communities have been erased. A clear war crime – arguably a crime against humanity.
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The GPM spoke about the ethnic cleansing of West Bank Palestinians with Fathi Nimer. Nimer is Palestine Policy Fellow of the Palestinian Policy Network, Al-Shabaka. Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM edition. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Watch our complete conversation here:
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