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Between 1947 and 1976, two factories released half a billion kilograms of chemicals called polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the Hudson river, in the north-east US. The effects on wildlife weren’t studied at the time, but today some species seem to be thriving despite levels of PCBs, many of which are toxic, remaining high.
At least one species, the Atlantic tomcod – an ordinary-looking fish about 10 centimetres long – has evolved resistance. “We could blast them with PCBs and dioxins with no effect,” says of New York University School of Medicine.
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Many of the ill effects of PCBs and dioxins are caused by them binding to a protein called the hydrocarbon receptor (). The Hudson tomcod all have a mutation in the receptor that stops PCBs binding to it, Wirgin and colleagues reported earlier this year. The mutation is present in other tomcod populations too, Wirgin says, but at low levels.
The most famous example of evolution in action was a response to pollution: as the industrial revolution got under way, cream-coloured peppered moths in northern Britain turned black to stay hidden on trees stained by soot. As the tomcod shows, though, most evolutionary changes in response to pollution are invisible.
The spoil heaps of many old mines, for instance, are covered in plants that appear normal, but are in fact growing in soil containing high levels of metals such as copper, zinc, lead and arsenic that would be toxic to most specimens of these and other species. The evolution of tolerance has occurred extremely rapidly in some cases, sometimes within just a few years of the soil being contaminated.
With very widespread pollutants, it is much harder to show that organisms are evolving in response, because all populations change at once. The comparison has been done with a common weed called plantain (Plantago major), though. Ground-level ozone, produced when sunlight strikes car exhaust fumes, greatly impairs the growth of plants. When researchers grew plantain seeds collected in 1985 and 1991 from a site in northern England where ozone pollution reached very high levels in 1989 and 1990, they found that the plants from the 1985 batch grew nearly a third more slowly when exposed to ozone, whereas the growth of those from 1991 fell by only a tenth ().
Since even the remotest parts of the planet are now polluted in one way or another, it is likely that many plants and animal populations have evolved some degree of tolerance, even though few cases have been documented. “Nobody looks for resistance,” says Wirgin. “My guess is that if you look you will find a lot of it.” His own discovery was entirely accidental: the team had set out to study liver cancers, and they only noticed the tomcod’s resistance when blasting the fish with PCBs failed to produce any tumours.
However, there are obviously limits to what evolution can achieve. This is especially true for small populations that reproduce slowly and have few offspring, such as the Yangtze river dolphin. Pollution is thought to have contributed to its extinction.
What’s more, pollution resistance in one species can have unexpected consequences for others. The tomcod’s tolerance allows it to accumulate extraordinarily high levels of PCBs in its body, for instance, which are a threat to animals higher up the food chain – such as humans with a taste for these reportedly delicious fish.
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