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Chemicals in Cootes Paradise are making fish sluggish Study says fish are burning energy to deal with effluent from treatment plant instead of on feeding, mating by Mark McNeil, Hamilton Spectator If you've ever noticed fish looking unusually tuckered out in the waters of Cootes Paradise, a new McMaster study might have an explanation. It seems effluent from the Dundas Wastewater Treatment Plant could be the cause. The study published this week in the journal Environmental Science and Technology says wild sunfish downstream from the plant expended 30 per cent of their energy to push back the onslaught of chemicals. That means less stamina for other things like finding food and a mate. "The main thing we found is that the exposure essentially required the fish to burn a lot more energy," said Graham Scott, senior author of the research paper. A lot of chemicals — including pharmaceuticals — just pass through the treatment plants into receiving waters. Expose...

CATCH News – April 11, 2012 Water protection law threatened The city of Hamilton was charged and convicted under the  Fisheries Act  of polluting a local creek and Hamilton Harbour with toxic chemicals, and was forced to pay a record fine a decade ago and spend millions to fix the problematic leaking landfills. Now the federal government is  poised  to drastically weaken that legislation apparently to speed approval of a pipeline across British Columbia that would carry Alberta tar sands bitumen to foreign refineries. The  widely reported  planned changes to the  Fisheries Act  referred to in the recent federal budget could also prevent prosecution of parties responsible for other pollutants  entering  local waterways including the chemical contamination running off Hamilton’s airport. Whether charges should be laid on the latter contamination is a specific question now before the federal auditor general as a result of a  ...