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More than half the world’s populations of killer whales are likely to collapse in the coming decades, according to a model of that predicts the effects of a persistent class of toxic chemicals known as polychlorinated biphenyls. The results on PCBs’ effects on orcas appear today (September 28) in Science.
Once commonly used in commercial products, PCBs were banned in the United States in 1978 and worldwide in 2004. Yet they continue to leach into the oceans, where they become concentrated in the fat of predators such as orcas. “Anything built in the ’60s and ’70s, there’s a good chance that they contain PCBs, and if they’re improperly disposed in a landfill, those PCBs have a chance of entering the environment,” coauthor Jean-Pierre Desforges of Aarhus University in Denmark tells The Atlantic. “And once there, it’s extremely hard to get rid of.”
Desforges and coauthors looked ...
