ANTELOPE ISLAND, Utah — Antelope Island is currently crawling with giant spiders, and a team of researchers from Weber State University couldn’t be more excited.
That's because the orb-weavers are an easy-to-catch indicator of environmental dangers to humans.
“The purpose of my research is to understand how much mercury from the Great Salt Lake makes its way into the food web,” Weber State University’s Dr. Rebecca Brasso said while explaining her research.
Dr. Brasso is primarily interested in the health of the birds that use the Great Salt Lake, but they’re hard to catch. Luckily for her, there are millions of the orb-weaver spiders sitting on webs along the shoreline,
and their diet of brine flies is the same as the birds.
Those brine flies introduce mercury into the food chain.
“Any of the contaminants that they've accumulated in the lake during that development time, like mercury, comes with them out of the lake and gets transferred into the food webs,” Brasso said.
For the past six years, Brasso’s main research question has been whether the amount of mercury that comes out of the lake through the brine
flies changes with the rising and falling of the lake each year.
Research shows that one major impact of mercury is the birds lay fewer eggs and this is a particular concern for the birds of the lake. Numbers show their populations have struggled during low water years.
Another concern is how mercury contaminated waterfowl then impact the human population.
“Even very low concentrations of mercury have been shown to impact a variety of aspects of our body systems,” Brasso warned.
The team found that as the lake levels decline, mercury concentrations declined in both the brine flies and the spiders the converse is also true.
Now Brasso us working to pinpoint why that may be.
“If they are consuming these high mercury items and then a human consumes them, then there is a human health risk associated.”
