WA-first trial to investigate effectiveness of Gross Pollutant Traps
Ecologically important Herdsman Lake selected as trial site
Supports WA Government’s Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery Strategy 2030
Water Minister Dave Kelly today announced that the installation of specialised traps designed to capture plastic and floating litter on stormwater drains at Herdsman Lake had been completed under a new Water Corporation trial funded by the McGowan Government.
Three Gross Pollutant Traps (GPTs) have been fitted to drainage inlets and outlets at the lake, which is an important urban habitat for waterbirds and other native fauna.
The two-year trial will assess the devices’ effectiveness and determine operational requirements such as maintenance and litter disposal.
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.
Perth urban wetlands home to hundreds of tiger snakes, researcher finds
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Damian Lettoof catches and measures tiger snakes at Perth wetlands.
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Damian Lettoof is completing a PhD at Curtin University on the health of tiger snakes, and to do that he needs to catch them lots of them.
In the past three years, he s caught more than 500 tiger snakes at four urban wetlands around Perth with the most found at a lake in Perth s western suburbs. I have been catching them so I can measure their body condition and count parasites to see if populations differ in health and if that relates to urbanisation, he told ABC Radio Perth Breakfast.