Sabrina Stark

Biology 1616

Brandy Conrad

11/15/17

Article Summary Assignment

Today I will be writing my summary on LEAD, MERCURY, SELENIUM, AND OTHER

TRACE ELEMENTS IN TISSUES OF GOLDEN EAGLES FROM SOUTHWESTERN MONTANA, USA

(Restani, 2013) This journal interested me because I have been fascinated with the eagle since I

was a child.

Introduction:

Some history that you need to know on the subject itself, before you read about the study

is that lead bullets are commonly used in hunting, and when the bullets strike bone or tissue they

fragment. They do not all stay together in a big hunk. The researchers during this study noticed

that all of the eagles that they were capturing in southwestern Montana had a fatal amount of

lead in their blood. The researchers note that they do not know much about how terrestrial

mammals react when exposed to high doses of lead. This is an important subject to learn about

not only because we care about our birds, but because this could potentially effect other animals

who also feed off of the same food source as the eagles. The researchers hypothesize that these

birds are being effected because they are eating off of carcasses that have been shot with lead

bullets, giving the eagles lead poisoning. They also hypothesize that age and sex also determine

how prone they are to lead, mercury, and selenium poisoning.

Material and methods:

 The scientists used roadkill as traps to capture the eagles. They then took blood samples

to discover what was going on inside of these birds. They looked for amounts of lead, mercury,

and selenium and also looked to see if their was any correlation with the birds age and gender.

They also took feathers from the eagles to sample for the same thing.

Results:

The results show that out of all the eagles captured and tested, most of the birds showed

high levels of lead in their blood, few birds had high levels of mercury, and all of the eagles had

high levels of selenium. Some other correlations they noticed were that there was more lead in

resident eagles, selenium was not related to the eagles age or gender, the lead in the blood

decreases from winter to spring, the lead in the feathers corelated to the lead in their blood, and

the levels of lead in general have been much lower in recent years. The scientists did not seem to

expect that selenium would be unrelated to everything, but all people had it.

Discussion:

It is possible that the levels of these things in the body is caused by the temperature

change or because during the winter they came from the north, so maybe that is why the lead,

mercury, and selenium is heightened. Today we learned that lead poisoning can be caused by

many more things than just contamination. Yet, we could always stand to do more experiments

on this hypothesis to be sure that our results are completely correct. This study could have been

more accurate if we had a larger group of eagles to test, if we added a control group from else

ware, and if we took into account that hunters can be using things other than rifles.

Conclusion:
 In conclusion, from this documented journal entre we learned a lot about under what

circumstances, do we see these elements showing up in the blood of eagles, and we must take

into account that this all still needs a bit or piecing together. Thank you for reading my summary.
Bibliography
Restani, A. R. (2013). Lead, Mercury, Selenium, and other trace elements in tissues of golden eagles in
southwestern Montana, USA. Journal of wildlife diseases., 114-124.