1 would you have possibility of detecting cadmium and mercury in those 



2 sediments. 



3 Going on, in our lab at Battelle, we tried to address the question 



4 of whether barium and chromium, the two most abundant metals in drilling 



5 muds, were bioavailable and if they could be passed through a marine 



6 food chain. 



7 Basically what we did here, this is a study we did with juvenile 



8 lobsters, and this was for 99 days, we fed them either uncontaminated 



9 sediment--we put them in aquaria with uncontaminated sediment or 



10 sediment that had been contaminated with the solid phase of the drilling 



11 fluid. 



12 We fed them either depurated food, uncontaminated food, or 



13 contaminated food. The contaminated food was polychaete worms that had 



14 been allowed to dig in and ingest drilling mud contaminated sediments 



15 for several days. 



16 The depurated food, we just took the live worms out of that 



17 contaminated sediment, put them in clean sediment for a day before 



18 introducing them. This was continued for 99 days so that the lobsters 



19 actually ate their own body weight worth of food several times over. I 



20 think it was four or five times their own body weight in food. 



21 Basically at the end of 56 days, there were two groups of--the 



22 vertical lines connect results that are not statistically different. 



23 So, at 56 days, with respect to barium, the two groups that seemed 



24 to have accumulated barium, and those are the animals that were on 



25 contaminated sediments, but the food was not a source of barium to 



26 either group, because there is no difference between animals fed 



27 uncontaminated food and those fed contaminated food. 



28 Chromium, there was no uptake by any group from the contaminated 



29 sediments or clean sediments. At the end of 99 days, the chromium 



30 results were essentially the same, but barium we had now three groups 



31 statistically. 



32 Strangely enough, the animals fed uncontaminated food had the 



33 highest concentrations of barium in their tissues. Basically what all 



94 



