New Hurdle for California Condors May Be DDT From Years Ago

[XemaSab]

Four years ago, in a musky, leaf-lined cavity halfway up a 200-foot redwood tree here, two California condors made the region’s first known nesting attempt in more than a century.

Joe Burnett, a senior wildlife biologist with the Ventana Wildlife Society and the lead biologist for the Central California condor recovery program, who had been monitoring the condor pair, was delighted with this promising development in the continuing effort to save the nation’s largest bird from extinction. When this first breeding attempt proved unsuccessful, Mr. Burnett attributed it to the young birds’ inexperience. But when he climbed the giant tree to examine the abandoned nest, he was stunned at what he uncovered: the first evidence of a potentially significant new hurdle for the condor program.

“The eggshell fragments we found appeared abnormally thin,” Mr. Burnett said. “They were so thin that we had to run tests to confirm that it was a condor egg.” The fragments reminded him of the thin-shelled eggs from birds like brown pelicans and peregrine falcons, which had been devastated by DDT but are now on the rebound.

The discovery raised a disturbing question: could DDT — the deadly pesticide that has been banned in the United States since 1972 — produce condor reproductive problems nearly four decades later?



http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/science/16condors.html?hp

[Tumbulu]

1. It is DDT residue from cotton imports

The EU tests for DDT residue, but the US does not. So the Indian and Chinese mills buy US grown cotton to produce products to export the EU. 15 years ago when I traveled to these countries I learned that the mills use their own DDT laden cotton for export to the US. The Chinese and Indian governments used to manufacture DDT and give it to their cotton farmers to keep their raw cotton prices down and thus put our mills out of business. it worked, we lost our domestic cotton spinning industry. Now if the US would only test imports for DDT residue and reject products with them, they would stop with horrible practice. The half life of DDT is 40 years.

[joshcryer]

2. That's appalling, and fully believable.

Got any links about this practice? I believe you, I'm just wondering.

[Tumbulu]

3. No, this was what the mill owners told me when I was trying to sell my organic cotton to them

That they bought US cotton for export to the EU and that they used their domestic cotton (with enough DDT residue to fail the EU tests) for their domestic and US export markets.