LETTER FROM THE AMAZON - Amazon Conservation Association

Letter from the Amazon January-March, 2010
Fins and Feathers
Letter from the director:
Dr. Adrian Tejedor, Director of Research
How does a research station benefit me? Why should I
care about science? One reason these questions always
crop up is that the answer is not straightforward. The
benefits of science surround us in agriculture,
technology, and medicine but the link between the
original bits of discovery and their practical applications
is rarely direct or well publicized.
How many hundreds of millions of us owe our existence
to the penicillin used by our ancestors - only one or two
generations back - to cure infections that before the
1950s were life-threatening? Who could have foreseen
that this savior antibiotic would come from a mold whose
effects were discovered by serendipity and put to work
only 20 years later? Given enough time, the rummaging
of scientists, often demeaned by non-specialists as the
search of the ‘leg of an ant, the fin of a little fish, or the
feather of a bird’, can have momentous consequences
for the quality of life of everyone on Earth.
Macaws, renowned for their beautiful feathers, by Sarah
Federman.
At its research stations, CICRA and Wayqecha, ACCA
seeks to foster both pure and applied science to solve
the most pressing environmental issues of the southern
Peruvian Amazon and the Andean cloud forest. In
addition to updates of the many projects and activities at
our stations, in this issue of the Letter from the Amazon,
you will find answers to one of the region’s most urgent
questions: how badly is mercury, used in gold mining in
the Madre de Dios River, contaminating aquatic and
terrestrial ecosystems? The evidence has come from, of
all things, fi ns and feathers.
Looking at the muscle at the base of the dorsal fin of
fish, CICRA’s grant program awardee Dr. Luis
Fernandez has figured out to what degree river fish, an
important source of protein in the Amazon, are being
contaminated by mercury. As you will read, the little fish
turn out to be the least contaminated and the best to eat.
Madre de Dios River by Sarah Federman.
Feathers, on the other hand, show us that mercury is
traveling away from the rivers through the food chain.
This story is told by Margaret (Peggy) Shrum, a longterm
researcher at CICRA who has discovered
potentially lethal concentrations of this toxic metal in the
Amazon’s top aerial predators: birds of prey. If this
pattern repeats in terrestrial food chains, it may indicate
that mercury contamination, with origins in river mining,
could reach further into terrestrial ecosystems and
persist for a longer time than previously realized.
These examples demonstrate that science can help us
make sensible choices when deciding what to eat or
where to look for what we eat in the Peruvian Amazon.
So then, should we fund scientists proposing to study
legs, fins, or feathers? I think we should.
The Andes glimpsed beyond the rainforest’s canopy; a sight to
revel in, a view worth protecting, by Sarah Federman.
3