EDIT: Here's an interesting quote from the Briefing Summary of that document the news article cites: "A trend analysis of data for 90 streams in a national fish mercury database (http://emmma.usgs.gov/) showed that mercury in fish generally decreased from 1969 to 1987."
Yes, that dose bring up a crap load of quesions.
90 streams where tested. How?
Where are these streams?
How much runoffs from indutral, roads, towns do these 90 stream recived?
How long did they collect data from each stream?
Did they just did one sample from each stream, or a serious of sample along the stream.
If one sample was collected, when and where?
Was the sample done when stream was at high levals from rain, melting snow caps, or was it done at low leveals.
At sampling point(s), was there any construction, accendent done up stream in the pass that leads to contanumation?
At any of these streams, if these a wast water treatment up stream that may contaminate the stream?
Thats just scraping the surface of the questions. The general public wont even think most, if any at all, of these question but just take the facts as to what they read. Good find on the site stoney.
Like you, i don't get to crazy about government reports too. I used to work for the USDA and if anything i don know about how they work, i do know that half of the studies are a wast of tax payers money. They get way to technical from start to end and accomplished vary little out of it.
