Western pond turtles in Sequoia National Park tested positive for pesticides

Western pond turtles in Sequoia National Park and other California remote wildlands have been exposed to an assortment of agricultural and industrial contaminants, according to a study from the National Park Service and the University of California, Davis. In the study, published online in the journal Chemosphere, scientists sampled for 57 compounds, including pesticides, in turtles, invertebrates, and sediments from three sites: Sequoia National Park, Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, and Six Rivers National Forest. Both current pesticides and those used in the past were prominent in sediments and in the insects, snails, and mollusks that turtles eat at Sequoia National Park, which is immediately upwind of Central Valley agriculture. Previous studies have linked pesticide use downwind of Sequoia National Park to the disappearance of a rare frog species, the foothill yellow-legged frog. Also, a 2013 study by this study’s lead author Erik Meyer, a scientist with Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, found that turtles in Sequoia National Park had signs of physiological impairment consistent with pesticide exposure.
“Pesticides don’t recognize boundaries,” said coauthor Brian Todd, a UC Davis associate professor of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology. “Even though we think of national parks as being protected from conservation threats like development, they’re not immune from pesticides and global contaminants that cross park borders.”
Source: Kaweah Commonwealth, May 23, 2016
http://www.kaweahcommonwealth.com/news/western-pond-turtles-sequoia-tes…