This Amazonian rodent could be yet another victim of mercury contamination.
Inside a camping tent in the middle of the Peruvian jungle, scientists are trying to determine just that.
"We started doing onsite testing for mercury because we are in a region where there's a lot of gold mining extraction."
Tests like this one are providing the first extensive indications
that mercury from illegal gold mining in the Amazon rainforest
is contaminating terrestrial mammals - from rodents to ocelots to titi monkeys.
Peruvians have mined gold for centuries.
Over the past 15 years, the southeastern region of Madre de Dios has become an epicenter of small-scale mining,
where some 46,000 miners are searching for gold along river banks.
The vast majority of them operate illegally in protected areas or informally with little regulatory oversight.
Some researchers say the miners often disregard environmental laws.
The miners also use toxic liquid mercury to separate precious metal from sediment.
Wildlife biologist Gideon Erkenswick:
"And so mercury in this process runs off into the environment or it gets burned and then becomes an aerosol that goes all over the place."??
Animals can ingest mercury through their diet, from the water they drink, or the air they breathe.
Reuters accompanied the researchers in Madre de Dios and reviewed their previously unreported findings.
Since 2018, the team from the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, the California nonprofit Field Projects International and Peruvian partner Conservación Amazônica
have collected samples from more than 2,600 animals representing at least 260 species.
(Gideon Erkenswick) "The main animal groups that we work with include birds, bats, nonhuman primates, small animals, so rodents and marsupials, some medium sized mammals and amphibians and reptiles."
??"From each of those capture events, we collect a range of non-lethal tissues, buccal swabs, skin swabs, nail clippings, a single blood jaw. And then we release the animals."
Of the 330 primate samples tested so far, virtually all showed mercury contamination.
How this will affect their health is not clear.
Veterinary toxicologist Caroline Moore:
"There is a general concern that, you know, if the mercury levels get high enough and are consistent enough and prevent animals from reproducing successfully or if they have a baby, that the baby cannot successfully grow up to be an adult."??
The rapid expansion of mining operations in the Amazon rainforest is seen by regional governments as an environmental and health threat.
The Peruvian government estimates that illegal miners dump about 180 metric tons of mercury in Madre de Dios annually.
In 2019, the government declared a state of emergency in that region
and deployed 1,500 police and soldiers to crack down on illegal mining.
The environment ministry did not respond to Reuters questions about mercury contamination.
In the years to come, scientists hope to create a long-term dataset in Peru and other mining hotspots
to understand how mercury could be affecting mammals globally.
"We're wondering, you know, are the birds exposed? If so, how? And if the birds are exposed, who else is exposed? Are the humans exposed? Are these megafauna also exposed? And what does it all mean? And so we're slowly building up that picture. And what we build up here can then be applied to other places in the world where mining and mercury exposures are a concern."
