Effects on wildlife studied

On a rainy night in the early 1990s, William Hopkins was at a contaminated coal-ash pond at the Savannah River Site near Augusta when he heard thousands of croaking frogs.

Hopkins was a graduate student at the time, and he began to wonder how these frogs, which happened to be breeding at the time, might be affected by the pollution. "It was a pivotal moment for me."

Hopkins went on to get his doctorate in biology at the University of South Carolina, writing his dissertation, "Effects of coal-combustion wastes on survival, physiology, and performance of the benthic-feeding fish, Erimyzon sucetta." He authored or co-authored more than 60 scholarly papers, many about the effects of coal-ash waste on wildlife. He participated in a major paper by the National Research Council about placing ash waste in abandoned mines, a practice the group said makes sense in some cases but also carries risks.

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Now an associate professor at Virginia Tech, Hopkins still focuses his research efforts on frogs and other amphibians. Frogs are good indicators of an area's ecological health because they have thin skin and other attributes that are easily affected by changes in the environment, he said. "We think of them as canaries in a coal mine."

The canaries aren't doing well, unfortunately, he said. Frogs and other amphibians are experiencing a mysterious and dramatic decline across the world. Pollution is one suspect, he said. Climate change and disease are others.

But his particular interest is coal-combustion waste, which he said is a complex brew of arsenic, selenium, chromium, mercury and other contaminants. More and more research is showing that these wastes are affecting wildlife.

An extreme case happened near Greensboro, N.C., where Duke Power operates a coal plant. Pollution from coal combustion waste poisoned Belews Lake with selenium in the 1970s, killing nearly every species of fish in the lake.

In 2006, Hopkins and his colleagues published a study showing that selenium from coal-ash wastes harms the reproduction and health of amphibians, one of the first studies to make that link.

He said ash ponds are deceptively dangerous. "It's a very common misconception from the public that just because you see wildlife in (a contaminated place), that they're doing OK."

Instead, he said these polluted places often lure wildlife away from good habitats and the animals end up being sickened by the pollutants.

At the Savannah River Site, which has a coal plant, coal ash has been dumped in ponds since the 1950s. Because of this legacy, studies show that amphibians and other wildlife have levels of arsenic, selenium and strontium much higher than specimens collected from unpolluted areas. "These waste products need to be managed very carefully," he said.