SOUND'S WASTE TELLS TALE
SCIENTISTS READ FECES FOR CLUES

By NATALIE PHILLIPS
Daily News reporter

ANCHORAGE- A couple of scientists studying the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill have figured out that tracking fish poop could turn out to be the ''canary in the coal mine'' that indicates when Prince William Sound's ecosystem is headed for trouble.

''It might allow us to see it coming in enough time to do something about it,'' said Jeff Short, one of the lead scientists conducting the study.

Short presented his work Friday morning to more than 250 scientists gathered at the Hotel Captain Cook for the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council two-day science symposium. Scientists gather annually to review study results and begin plotting next year's work. Over the past four years, about $400,000 in spill settlement money has been spent on the study done by Short and Patricia Harris, both biologists with the National Marine Fisheries Service at Auke Bay in Juneau.

The scientists who conduct spill studies are mostly employed by federal and state agencies. Each year, they apply to the Trustee Council for study grants. The council is charged with spending the $1 billion the state and federal governments got from settling lawsuits with Exxon following its 11 million gallon spill in 1989. Much of that money has been spend on purchasing coastal land. About $90 million has been spent so far on scientific studies.

The council's chief scientist, Robert Spies, has called Harris and Short's study ''a very innovative'' approach that could turn into an important tool for monitoring marine productivity in the Sound. Compared to most other monitoring programs, their system is considered cheap.

Short and Harris are tracking a nontoxic hydrocarbon called pristane that makes it way through the fishes' digestive systems.

Pristane is produced by copepods, which are small shrimp-like crustaceans. Copepods are considered the Big Macs of the sea, Short explained. Though only 1/8-inch in size, they are full of fat. And for fish fry that have to eat fast and grow big in a hurry or be eaten, the copepods are a favorite fast food.

''When (fish) ingest these copepods, most of the pristane is absorbed across the intestine, but some is excreted as feces,'' Short said. The fish poop is then ingested by mussels. And that's where the scientists go to look for it.

Scientists are starting to correlate high levels of pristane with booming populations of species that feed on the copepods, like salmon and herring. Low levels of pristane could indicate a problem.

Since 1994, the scientists have been collecting mussel samples, sometimes monthly and biweekly, from 30 sites in the Sound. In some cases, the samples are collected by volunteers and by students living in the Sound who volunteer through a program with the Chugach School District called Youth Area Watch.

The study is an off-spring of work that Short did back in the late 1970s as the trans-Alaska pipeline was about to spring into operation. He was in the Sound taking mussel samples looking for base levels and presence of hydrocarbons. He collected a lot of data but ''it wasn't very sexy,'' he said. Then the spill hit. His data ''turned out to be a gold mine.''

Going back and analyzing that data now shows that there was a significant drop in pristane levels in the late 1970s that correlated with a collapse of salmon populations, Short said.

So far, the scientists can demonstrate an annual rise in pristane levels in the mussels from mid-April to mid-May. If those numbers were to drop, it might be an early indication of a population drop in near-shore aquatic species, like salmon and herring, Short said.

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