Nothing fishy about it

Alex Coolman

ANAHEIM -- In a narrow trailer parked in a lot, Greg Woodside is

showing off some very small fish.

Woodside, the health and regulatory director for the Orange County

Water District, lifts the lid on an aquarium, causing 60 Japanese medaka

fish to scramble in a dark flurry.

“The real question of this,” he said. “Is can we keep the fish alive?”

If the answer to Woodside’s question turns out to be no, Newport-Mesa

residents should be concerned.

The aquarium is part of a nine-month study to determine if there are

any unknown hazards lurking in the water that is used to recharge

drinking water aquifers for this area.

The fish, whose tanks have been supplied since March with water drawn

from the Santa Ana River, are so far behaving normally -- growing and

living and dying at about the same rate as fish that are living in

dechlorinated tap water.

But should the fish begin to croak, designers of the study say, it

will be an indication that the water is not quite as user-friendly as it

should be.

Water district officials don’t have any reason to believe that there

is anything hazardous in the water now, Woodside said. But the increasing

pace of industrialization in the watershed for the Santa Ana River means

there are more ways for the water to become contaminated than ever

before.

“There’s more paving,” he explained. “You have more runoff on roads

with oil and grease.”

For that matter, communities in San Bernardino and Riverside counties

discharge reclaimed water -- highly treated sewage water, basically --

into the river. And as populations rise, so do the rates of discharge.

All those dubious flows affect what the water district does -- and

what Newport-Mesa residents end up drinking -- because the water from the

river is the primary source for replenishing ground water aquifers.

For that reason, officials want to test the river water as thoroughly

as possible, said Jack Skinner, a Newport Beach water-quality advocate

who sits on the scientific advisory panel for the study.

“There are a lot of methods of doing chemical analysis and things of

that nature, but one of the most reassuring things to biological

scientists is that you’ve got a living, breathing animal that is actually

in the water 100% of the time and acts as a canary in the cage,” Skinner

said.

Twenty-four tanks of medaka and eight tanks of zebra fish, as well as

a few tanks of bluegill, are being tested in the $250,000 study, which is

funded both by the water district and the National Water Research

Institute.

For now, said Woodside, the study is focusing on a fairly basic method

of analysis: researchers will measure simple things like survival levels,

growth rates and any obvious, visual quirks of the river water-raised

fish.

In further projects, researchers hope to tackle more complex problems,

such as incidence of tumors and diseases in the fish.

Before anything so ambitious can be accomplished, however, the water

district must be sure it has the nuts and bolts of fish-keeping down.

Bacterial blooms killed a few of the test creatures a while back, and it

hasn’t been easy to control other variables like temperature and oxygen

content of the tank water.

To a large extent, these things must be learned in the process of

conducting the study, Skinner said. There just aren’t many other places

trying to accomplish this kind of biological testing.

“Right now it’s very rare,” he said. “You could count the places that

are doing this on your fingers.”