Across the huge Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan’s crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away — the first time a large migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.
“We were frankly kind of startled,” stated Nicholas Fisher, one of the researchers reporting the findings online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times increased than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in prior years. But even so, that is still far under secure-to-consume limits set by the U.S. and Japanese governments.
Previously, smaller fish and plankton were discovered with elevated ranges of radiation in Japanese waters after a magnitude-9 earthquake in March 2011 triggered a tsunami that badly broken the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors.
But scientists did not expect the nuclear fallout to linger in huge fish that sail the world since this kind of fish can metabolize and shed radioactive substances.
Sources and more information:
• Bluefin tuna caught near U.S. show radioactive taint from Japan
The Associated Press reported that across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan’s crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away – the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.
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