SAFEwater-NC, a community research study led by NC State’s Belcher Lab, studies alligators and fish in the Wilmington area as an effort to study the effects of PFAS, a set of forever chemicals, on living populations.
Dr. Scott Belcher, associate professor of biological sciences, leads the research team.
Belcher said perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as PFAS, are a set of an estimated 12,000 persistent chemicals that gained widespread commercial use after they were first discovered in the ‘40s. PFAS chemicals have water, oil and grease-repellent properties, contributing to their uses in nonstick coatings, such as teflon, stain-resistant fabrics and firefighting foams.
Following their mass production, Belcher said PFAS found their way into rivers connected to manufacturing plants. This resulted in the contamination of multiple drinking water sources, such as the Cape Fear River, which is polluted with the polymer manufacturing agent GenX.
It was not until 2017 that the Cape Fear River’s contamination was discovered, which prompted questions about its effects on humans who had been drinking contaminated water for decades.
Belcher said SAFEwater-NC started in response to this news and was initially funded by NC State’s North Carolina Sea Grant. Since little was known about the effects of PFAS on people drinking the contaminated water, Belcher and his associates looked to alligators and fish living in the water since it was first contaminated.
“We put together this community engagement group to use alligators as potential sentinel — kind of like a canary in the coal mine,” Belcher said.
Dr. Thomas Jackson, an alumnus of NC State’s doctoral program in toxicology, said SAFEwater-NC is studying alligators because of the similarities they share with humans.
“They’re long-lived, apex predators, and they share some of the same waterways that we get our drinking water,” Jackson said. “Some of these alligators that we capture that are 11 to 12 feet long, have probably lived in that same waterway for 30 or 40 years, and they’ve been consuming the same fish that fishermen and people in the population there and Wilmington would be consuming. So we’re able to capture a lifetime reflection of what an animal that’s actually living in these potentially contaminated waters has accumulated.”
Belcher said the bulk of SAFEwater-NC’s fieldwork involves temporarily catching and studying alligators and fish found in the Cape Fear River and Greenfield Lake in Wilmington.
Jackson said the most alarming effects the study found were in the immune systems of alligators; they normally have one of the most resilient immune systems in the animal kingdom and often survive after losing limbs.
According to Jackson, the research group affectionately named an alligator from their reference site “Stumpy,” as he only has one limb — the rest presumed bitten off during territorial conflicts with other alligators. After catching and observing him for three years, Jackson said Stumpy is healthy despite his loss of limbs.
SAFEwater-NC found that the alligators in Greenfield Lake and Wilmington do not exhibit the same immune responses as normal alligators like Stumpy.
“We should see alligators feeling well and able to withstand having their tail bitten off, having their arm bitten off, fighting with another gator and having these massive wounds, those should heal,” Jackson said. “What we’re seeing, specifically in the Greenfield Lake and in Wilmington population of these alligators, is wounds that are not healed. There are clearly infected wounds, and the skin lesions that have clearly been there for a long time, when you look at the wound, you can see that it’s not fresh, but it’s not healed.”
Jackson said this raises concern because alligators have a much more nuanced immune system than humans.
“Seeing it in a species as resilient as alligators with an immune system as good as theirs should be, is terrifying,” Jackson said. “And we’re much more susceptible than they are.”
PFOA and PFOS, the most common PFAS chemicals, were largely phased out in the United States in 2006, but GenX is still commonly used in production of polymer manufacturing.
While SAFEwater-NC does not specifically advocate for or against any policy, Jackson said PFAS chemicals have many essential uses, but the discussion surrounding their essential and nonessential uses should be expanded in order to reduce any more contamination.
According to Belcher, while most PFAS are nearly impossible to remove, research done by groups such as SAFEwater-NC can help to raise awareness of the regional, national and global effects of PFAS.
“We’re going to be stuck living with PFAS for quite some time,” Belcher said. “I think one of the things that we really have to do is attempt to put the genie back in the bottle and stop the ongoing discharge when we’re manufacturing these things. They’re very important for the future global economy, they go into a lot of applications that are important, but what we should not be doing is just freely discharging them into environments.”
