“
~--”
.—
.
.
Page Eight
Jonathan Welsgall
January 21, 1982
such as tuna and mackerel, the roof fish inhabit specific niches
in the atoll’s lagoon, and the student was studying the interplay
between fish niche and fish ccmnunity In Pacific atolls.
“,
There are two studies of fish population at Bikini, both of
“
which are relevant here. Those studies by Leonard P. Schultz are
titled “The Biology of Bikini Atoll With Special Reference to the
Fishes” (Smithsonian Institution Annual Reports for 1947: 301-16,
Washington, D.C., GPO, 1948) and “Fishes of the Marshall and Mariana
Islands” (U.S. National Museum 8ulletin 202, Washington, D.C., 1953).
In the 1953 study, Schultz states that “In the biological cycling
of materials there Is not only an abundance of organisms but also
a wide variety of species --some 700 a~nq the fishes alone--so that
whatever is not utilized by one ~qulckly%kfianother.
” (Quoted
from Jack fobin’s doctoral dissertation, “The Resettlement of the
Enewetak People: A Study of a Displaced Comnunity in the Marshall
Islands,” 1967, University of California at Berkeley, page 54.)
While on Utirik between the years 1975 and 1977, I recall that
the islanders regularly ate between 30 and 40 different species of
roof fish. Many of these fish--like the parrotfish--subsist by
eating coral, and it is my guess that certain radionuclides (e.g.~
strontium-90) probably got recycled in the man-environment foodchain
If this hypothesis is correct, the Marshallese are In
complex.
trouble: no lesssthan one-third of all the fish I ate for two years
on Utirik were parrotfish, and many of the others were likewise coraleaters.
In this regard, I direct you to a study of ecosystem contamination
at Bikini and Enewetak by researchers from the fish laboratory at
the University of Washington at Seattle. This study is titled:
“Polonium-210 and plutonium-239, plutonium-240 in the biological and
water samples from the Bikini and Enewetak atolls~” and appears in
Nature, vblume 255, May 22, 1975, pp. 321-23.
It is rather curious
why the researchers of this study--who were funded b .—
the DOE-8 isotopes, while
restricted their analysis to only t~a=mentione
they completely ignored cesium-137, strontium-90, cobalt-60,
americium-241, etc. The authors did mention, however. that “The
overall result indicates that inside the lagoon the radioactivity
values of plutonium were more variabl~ than those of polonium-210
leads me to suspect
(page 323, emphasis added).” ~tatement
that we are still shooting in the dark when we discuss possible
radionuclide uptake for the people of Bikini, should they decide to
return home.
“5. RestrictIons on access to Bikini and compliance with
prescribed diet. Your experiences in the Marshall Islands would
be useful in this regard.”
Uhile In the Marshalls early last year as a consultant
or the Marshall Islands Litigation Project, I interviewed several
people from Utirik who recounted their experiences after their
evacuation following the 1954 “Bravo” hydrogen test. Most of the
people from Utirik told me how they were instructed not to eat the
local foods from Utirik when they returned home after their threemonth evacuation to Kwajalein. The following excerpt from an
{cent’d. )
F’
——
,~“
.’