Endocrine Disruption in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Watershed: Laboratory and Field Experiments on a Resident Fish, Menidia audens, the Mississippi silverside

Endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) are widely recognized as being highly toxic to aquatic life and capable of impairing normal sexual development, behavior and fertility in fish. This project examines whether EDCs could also be contributing to population declines of some fishes in the Bay-Delta. To do this, the fellow is characterizing the cellular-detox defense mechanism of the Mississippi silverside and conducting field surveys and outplanting experiments to test for evidence of large-scale, population-level toxicity. The final deliverable of the project will be a model incorporating the effects of EDCs on fish survivorship, relative to other human-activities (e.g., entrainment into the state and federal water diversion systems).