By: Brooke Fisher
Photos: Mark Stone/University of Washington
Top image: CEE associate professor Ed Kolodziej gestures toward Thornton Creek, an urban stream that runs from Shoreline through northeast Seattle until it reaches Lake Washington.
Just as salmon swim against the current, a team of researchers faced a difficult journey on their quest to answer a decades-old problem: what causes the death of coho salmon that are exposed to stormwater runoff?
After five years, the UW-led research team has successfully traced the previously unexplained coho salmon mortality to a formerly unknown chemical that is a byproduct of an industrial chemical widely used to preserve rubber tires of which three billion are produced annually around the world.