Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2006SC30B

A Statewide Biomarker Approach to Investigate Pollution Effects on fish in Wadeable Streams of South Carolina

Institute: South Carolina
Year Established: 2006 Start Date: 2006-03-01 End Date: 2007-02-28
Total Federal Funds: $29,860 Total Non-Federal Funds: $64,676

Principal Investigators: Peter Van Den Hurk, Stephen Klaine, Aaron Roberts, Marc Scott

Project Summary:

Recently, the State of South Carolina, Department of Natural Resources (DNR) was awarded a State Wildlife Grant to Conduct an assessment of wadeable streams to gather appropriate data that will allow SCDNR to design effective and efficient management strategies to protect, conserve, and restore the aquatic resources of the State. These landscape-level assessments are intended to provide us with the ability to understand causal pathways of threats to aquatic resources, communicate aquatic resource status and trends to interested stakeholders, and to recommend strategies for resource conservation at the planning stages of land management and development projects. Watersheds of appropriate size (i.e., those that drain to wadeable streams) will be sampling units stratified by unique combinations of ecoregion and major river basin in the state, called ecobasins. The following parameters will be characterized within these 400 watersheds: point sources as measured by NPDES permits, nonpoint sources as measured by appropriate land use/land cover classes in entire basin and within riparian buffer, hydrological disruption as measured by impounded area. In each stream, selected measures of channel geomorphology and flow characteristics, water quality, and vertebrate and invertebrate community structure will be quantified. This effort will take place over three years and result in one of the most comprehensive statewide assessments available.

By collaborating with DNR, we have a unique opportunity to develop and apply measures of fish health that would augment this extensive effort. Biomarkers provide a biochemical measure of contaminant exposure in fish. The opportunistic sampling of fish in all 400 watersheds over the next three years, coupled with the measurement of a series of biomarkers, will provide insight into reasons for changes in population and community metrics measured within each stream. Indicators for fish health to be measured are hepatosomatic index, gonadosomatoc index and splenosomatic index. Specific biomarkers indicating exposure to pollutants include EROD activity, bile fluorescence, and induction of metallothionein and vitellogenin. Together with the physico-chemical water and sediment quality data that will be collected at the same sampling sites (as proposed in a parallel research proposal), a comprehensive overview will be achieved of the population status, health and risks of resident fish in all watersheds in South Carolina.