A relatively simple, inexpensive method of filtering urban stormwater runoff dramatically boosted survival of newly hatched coho salmon in an experimental study. That's the good news for the threatened species from the Washington State University-led research. The bad news: unfiltered stormwater killed almost all of them.
, are consistent with previous research on adult and juvenile coho that found exposure to untreated roadwaythat typically winds up in waterways during storms resulted in mortality of 60% or more. For the coho hatchlings in this study, mortality from runoff exposure was even higher at 87%.
To understand runoff impacts and possible interventions, researchers set up experiments with about 8,400 fertilized coho eggs, placing a subset under direct exposure to runoff produced by 15 storms in the Seattle area. That water contained a host of contaminants including dissolved metals andCoho eggs have a thick shell and all the embryos survived under the different treatments, but once they hatched, most of young fish, called alevins, in the set exposed to the runoff died.
In this study, the researchers also exposed another set of alevins to runoff that first had gone through biofiltration. The method was able to remove most contaminants and those fish survived at similar rates to a control group raised in just clean water.
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