Lake Huron, PCBs

Fed PCB-contaminated common carp (Cyprinus carpio) from Saginaw Bay, Lake Huron. Total PCBs in diet was 8.4 mg/kg FW ration (including, in pg/kg FW, 0.3 of PCB 81,... 

Restum, J.C., S.J. Bursian, J.P. Giesy, J.A. Render, W.G. Helferich, E.B. Shipp, D.A. Verbrugge, and R.J. Aulerich. 1998. Multigenerational study of the effects of consumption of PCB-contaminated carp from Saginaw Bay, Lake Huron, on mink. 1. Effects on mink reproduction, kit growth and survival, and selected biological parameters. Jour. Toxicol. Environ. Health 54A 343-375. 

Physical-chemical data representative of the site appear in Table II. A particular PCB congener, 2, 4, 2 , 4 -tetrachlorobiphehyl was used to specify a molecular diffusivity, and value of the biodiffusion coefficient representative of Lake Huron sediments was used in the absence of one for the Fox River. The latter was corrected for temperature a factor of 2 increase for each 10 C increase was assumed (14). A correlation developed for stream-beds was used to estimate p as a function of flow rate (9). The results of these computations appear in Table II. 

The first published measurements of PCBs in the Great Lakes surface waters are those of Veith et al. [233], who reported total PCB concentrations in western Lake Superior (at the Duluth EPA laboratory intake) of 0.8 ng L-1 in 1972. An initial attempt to survey PCB levels in the Great Lakes was that of Glooschenko et al. [234], who sampled Lakes Superior and Huron in late July and early August, 1974. Two liters of surface water (lm depth) was... 

The current trend data for PCBs in lake trout collected for the US program are shown in Fig. 12 (Swackhamer, unpublished data, 2005). These data indicate that PCBs declined rapidly following their ban in both the USA and Canada in the early to mid-1970s. This decline was consistent with a first-order decay, and has been described in that manner previously [277,304]. The rate of decline in PCBs in Lakes Superior, Huron, and Michigan clearly changed in the mid-1980s [277]. Since then, the PCB concentrations in the upper three lakes have declined at a much slower rate, if at all. The half-fives in the 1970s were on the order of 4-6 years, while the half-fives since the... 

Fig. 12 Trends in PCBs in lake trout from Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Ontario. Data are means of approximately 10 composites of 5 whole fish, each 600-700 mm in length. All fish from a given lake are from the same site...

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