In economics there's a saying ..."All other things being equal...". I expect that in pure science subjects there are even stronger sayings which imply that if you are testing a theory that you try to minimize the number of variables so that any changes can be attributed properly to the one factor or item that you are trying to examine.
I suggest that economics is something like hydrogeology in that it is both an art as well as a science. That said today I'm going to be discussing fish tissue contamination with toxic chemicals. The toxic chemicals include mercury, PCBs, dioxins/furans and DDT compounds. All of these are bioaccumulative hence once ingested they move up the food chain (forage fish) to mink, raccoons, coyotes, hawks, osprey, herons etc.
Therefore in a scientific manner a so called professional examining fish tissues for chemical contamination should do one fish species at a time, at the same location, using the same tissues (eg. liver/lean tissue/fatty tissue etc.), perhaps even at the same time each season for one to be able to confidently suggest that toxin concentrations are rising or falling over the years.
Also while wild fish can not likely literally have the exact same fish tested year after year in a wild habitat, at the very least fish of a similar age and size should be used consistently. This is because older and bigger (& fatter) fish tend to accumulate these particular toxins in their fatty tissues. Therefore again one should reduce the number of variables as much as possible when allegedly comparing fish accumulations of toxins over time.
Therefore I have to ask what the hell GHD are doing with their forage fish toxin testing by mixing and matching fish species throughout. Bluntnose minnows, creek chub, common shiners, Blacknose Dace and Fathead minnows are all thrown into the mix in their 2020 Forage Fish testing. If there somehow is little or no metabolic difference in their rates of accumulation of toxins then readers of the report need to be explicitly informed and are not.
There is also one other concern for me and that is location. Presumably each fish is caught in the specific location claimed whether upstream, downstream or even on the Uniroyal/Lanxess property. The problem of course is that fish are not immobile. Maybe these forage fish are ALL known to hang out their entire lives close to home (say a couple of hundred metres one way or the other???). Again if that is so perhaps readers should be so informed and not that I don't trust the lying buggers but a technical citation or reference would also be nice.
I see and smell way too many opportunities for gamesmanship for dishonest groups to do their self-serving thing.
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