Fog brings poison mercury to Santa Cruz Mountains -- mountain lions are suffering

[Beringia]

https://www.sfchronicle.com/environment/article/Fog-brings-poison-mercury-to-Santa-Cruz-Mountains-14862445.php

(I read about mountain lions with neurological problems in Florida too, I wonder if it is mercury there too).


Three times as much mercury has been found in mountain lions in the Santa Cruz Mountains than in their inland brethren, and the likely culprit is coastal fog, a first-of-its-kind study by UC Santa Cruz has found.

The fog is apparently pulling mercury out of the ocean and dripping it over the coastal mountains, a potentially lethal problem for cougars because it bioaccumulates in their fat and could eventually contribute to their demise, the study, published Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports, concluded.

Mercury poisoning is known to cause memory and motor coordination problems and has been shown in studies in the Florida Everglades to cause reproductive problems in pumas. Mercury can come from natural sources, but researchers said most of the mercury currently in the atmosphere comes from burning coal.

But mountain lions weren’t the only study subjects that bolstered the fog hypothesis. The scientists also tested deer, the cougar’s primary prey, and lichen, a mossy plant that the deer eat. The deer on the coast had twice as much methylmercury, but the lichen from the Santa Cruz area had four times as much of the chemical than its inland examples.

“The lichen is important because mercury in lichen can only come from the atmosphere,” said Peter Weiss-Penzias, an environmental toxicologist at UC Santa Cruz and the lead author of the study. “Deer and puma could get their mercury from other sources (mainly from consuming fish), but because the lichen shows the same pattern, it strengthens our argument, or hypothesis.”

[marble falls]

1. Scary stuff. Frightening when one considers how much fog is part of west coast environmental ecology