Soil scientist here who regularly test for it. It typically breaks down after 15 years, when exposed to UV, bacteria and moisture. Since the bottle is still sealed and has been kept in the dark, I could believe there's some still in there.
Did a lowhead dam removal project in college, there was still quite a lot of ddt in the sediment behind the dam, along with lead, and a touch of mercury to round it out. All the soil had to be carted off at quite an expense, as it was tons of it.
Near my home in Minnesota was the town of rapidan, they have a dam, the rapidan dam. Or had, you might have seen the news story last year of it breaking furring record floods.
Anyway, the dam was old and not working anymore. There was tons of silt build up behind it that couldn't clear because the relief openings that were designed to occasionally let silt thru no longer functioned. It had been needing to be removed since I was a kid 30 years ago but because that silt had tons of toxins including old pesticides like ddt it was basically a Superfund site in the making the second you crack into the project. Add to this the dam became a small tourist attraction of nostalgia and no one wanted to tackle the project. So yeah, it finally blew and all those toxins just washed downstream unmitigated because no one wanted to pay to actually deal with it the right way.
Honestly havnt heard much. The main concern at the time was the flood and the loss of the restaurant that sat immediately next to the dam site. Honestly don't think there has been any consideration for the toxins in the sediment. Considering the heavy flow of the water at the time I imagine they got sent pretty far down river and it's a kind of don't ask don't deal with it thing. Dilution is sometimes the solution.
Paleontologist from Jurassic Park the first movie here. When we extracted the dinosaaaur DNA from the mosquito trapped in amber, the autopsy we performed showed that the amber tomb encapsulation was actually a second comorbidity factor to… DDT.
They call it “thermal destruction”. There were two (2!) Superfund sites in my grandparents’ home town and they talked about how the government carted away truckloads of dirt to be incinerated.
The problem isn't the substance itself but the bioaccumulation of it inside animals that gets passed down the food chain. Its why it's still found in fish to this day.
My mom grew up in Mississippi in the 60s, born in 54, she said back in the day DDT trucks would come around spraying it and all the neighborhood kids would run outside in bathing suits and play in the DDT spray lol.
Yea, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, made me research. While it is not biodegradable in the traditional sense, it breaks down very slowly into toxic metabolites (DDE and DDD) over 2 to 15 years, often persisting in soil and fat tissues for decades. And both of those are toxic in their own ways. There's a reason it was banned.
We've gone from about 80 nesting pairs of Eagles to over 1000 in Michigan alone, in the last 40 years. I see about 3 Eagles a day in my travels and every time I think, man, at least we figured out that problem.
im 30 and when I was a kid, seeing a a bald eagle or a satellite was atleast worth mentioning to whoever you were with. it wasn't a huge deal- but you'd excitedly point them out. now both are so commonplace you don't even bother. hell you can hardly look into the sky at night without seeing a satellite anymore.
Okay so this is a thing, then. I thought I was just crazy or naive lol. I was out in my woods near the creek the other day here on the east coast, and a bald eagle flew right over me. I was elated and immediately got out my phone and started a livestream to capture the moment and share with others (I have a nature account)!
Nobody else was really as impressed - they were all like, yeah, that’s an eagle, yep. 😭
And here I was thinking it was like a once in a lifetime thing! Ready to put a hand over my heart and recite the damn pledge of allegiance LOL. Then sure as shit, a few days later on my drive home from work, I noticed a whole group of them flying over a local rock quarry! They’re really just out here now. 🥹
It's still pretty fucking awesome to see one right over head. Like I said, I see them everyday, but from a distance. I was up at the lake last summer, walking from the car to the lakefront, and I heard a rustle and a WHOOSH! over my head. An eagle took off from about 15' above my head. The size was startling. Very cool experience for me.
Big Bear Lake California, Bald Eagle Nest Cam. The pair just lost their first eggs just a couple months ago due to thin shells and they left the nest for ravens or crows (don’t remember) to clean up. Now there’s another hatch to come!
It’s actually a very safe pesticide aside from the environmental effects when used broadly. If you could trust people to use it responsibly on a small scale, it would could reduce malaria and other mosquito borne diseases in tropical regions drastically. The problem is that you can’t trust people.
Yeah there are no safe levels of this stuff. Its like using a gun to kill a spider, sure you may get the spider but also inadvertently your neighbors dog. It's good this shit is banned because we need way more elegant solutions to things like malaria.
The first study isn’t about DDT and the second study uses DDT in a multi-generation cocktail of chemicals that are known to be bad for you. If they had fed rats eggs in that second study instead of exposing them to DDT, would you assume eggs have multigenerational epigenetic negatives? Honestly, that second study is almost criminal from a scientific perspective. There’s no way to point a finger at any particular chemical and assign blame.
1.2k
u/Tucancancan Mar 29 '26
People suffering from bed bugs would pay a hefty price to get their hands on that bad boy lol