Fw: delineating wildlife sources of fecal bacteria?

["Jennifer Gadzala" <jgadzala@nirpc.org>]

The following is a message forwarded from NOAA's Coastal Program.  Julie's
email is provided below:


> Julie Vann wrote:
>
> >Hi, folks;
> >
> >I need some outside opinions on this topic.  We in GA are about to embark
> upon a fecal bacteria source tracking study in one of our estuaries where
> there is so little development that we believe that wildlife is the
> predominant source, but we need to prove it (there are public beaches
> there).  In fact, we have sampled a dozen or so of the tidal creeks
leaving
> natural (undeveloped) areas on Jekyll Island and the fecal coliform counts
> from most have ranged from 400 to 800, all presumably due to wildlife.
> However, there is a wastewater plant and about 3 septic tanks (which we
> dye-tested, to no avail) and some boat tie-off areas that are possible
> contributors to the Jekyll sound at large.  The state-of-the-art source
> tracking techniques like fluorescence, antibiotic-resistant bacteria
> analysis, ribotying, etc. are sort of based on the assumption that the
> prevailing source is human-derived - that is, they test for detergents,
> ramifications of antibiotic use, etc.  I have a hunch that if we were to
do
> such a source tracking study it would come up negative, and that would
leave
> us with the ambivalence of whether it was negative due to lack of human
> source or negative due to some variable of our macrotidal estuary that
> skewed or invalidated the technique.
> >
> >Anyone have any thoughts on this?  Has anyone experienced anything like
> this? Are any of you aware of any studies or methods that specifically
> delineate wildlife sources of fecal bacteria?
> >
> >thanks
> >Julie
julie_vann@dnr.state.ga.us



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