-6put on ice as soon as possible after collecting and placed in
a freezer on being returned to the laboratory.
Tissues were
dissected, weighed, and dried at the Eniwetok laboratory.
The
tissues taken were skin, muscle, bone, liver and viscera (diges-
tive tract and contents) from the larger fish, or like tissues
were pooled from a number of small fish of the same species,or
entire fish were used.
At the University of Washington
laboratory, the dried samples vere ashed at temperatures up to
540° C, cooled, slurried, dried and counted in an internal gasflow counting chamber.
The total number of plates resulting
from all 34 collections was 2,167 (averaging about 64 plates
per collection).
All counts for radioactivity were corrected to the date of
collection, the decay factors for all Eniwetok samples being
based on a soil sample collected at Belle Island May 15, 1954.
Corrections were also made for self-absorption, backscatter,
geometry and coincidence.
The radioactivity is expressed in
microcurtes per kilogram of wet tissue.
Disintegretions per
minute per gram can be converted to microcuries per kilogram
using the relationship uc/eg = (2.2) (10)3 a/n/g.
Results
ends or
Decline
the Levels of Radioactivit
General trends of the radioactivity in the fish collected
at Belle Island are shown in Figure 2.
Lines connecting the
points for data on muscle and liver tissue reveal trends similar