Frontiers | Contamination of Stream Sediment With Heavy Metals in the Awetu Watershed of Southwestern Ethiopia frontiersin.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from frontiersin.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Australia’s wetlands are home to a huge range of stunning flora and fauna, with large snakes often at the top of the food chain.
Many wetlands are located near urban areas. This makes them particularly susceptible to contamination as stormwater, urban drainage and groundwater can wash metals such as arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury into the delicate ecosystem.
We know many metals can travel up the food chain when they’re present in the environment. So to assess contamination levels, we caught highly venomous tiger snakes across wetlands in Perth, and repurposed laser technology to measure the metals they accumulated.