A Friendly Heads Up

Reporters mark your calendars. Tomorrow (Tuesday, January 5th) the EPA will release The National Lakes Assessment a report billed as “the first-ever assessment of the condition of the nation’s lakes.”

It is set to report that nearly 60% the nation’s lakes “support healthy biological communities.”

It is not set to report on anything that has to do with commercial seafood.

Why am I pointing this out, you ask? Well, the last time there were reports that merely mentioned water, fish and mercury the Fourth Estate thoroughly embarrassed itself by conflating the three, erroneously adding commercial seafood to the mix and misreporting the stories entirely.

You’ll remember the misguided muckraking on the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) report about mercury found in recreational fish from rivers and streams that somehow managed to mentioned commercial seafood and even sushi. And then there was the USGS report about mercury levels in the waters of the North Pacific that wannabe Woodward’s apparently didn’t check with Bernstein about before reporting mercury levels in fish were on the rise-oops USGS didn’t test the fish, only the water (time to fire up ye ole correction machine.)

Commercial seafood in the United States is not harvested from small local lakes. By in large it comes from the ocean and aquaculture. To be absolutely clear; the seafood you buy at the grocery store or order in a restaurant does not come from the shores of the lake at your local YMCA camp.