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Maddux Alexander Springer was free diving in Hawaii when he noticed green sea turtles with huge tumors.
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He spent 2.5 years researching the disease and discovered its likely root cause, as well as a solution.
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He won a top award at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, which earned the college $10,000.
Maddux Alexander Springer spent his pandemic free time in the blue waters of Oahu.
Every day the high school left the seahorses and eels and octopus in their fish tanks at home, walked a short distance to Kāne’ohe Bay, and went free diving.
“It’s almost like you’re an alien,” Springer, now 18, told Business Insider. “There you are just yourself in this environment that you don’t really belong to.”
Sometimes, though, it seemed like he was diving through a graveyard. He saw green sea turtles with cauliflower-like tumors.
“They were just gross masses that were anywhere from the size of a penny to the size of a football. And it would just contain the green sea turtles,” he said. “They’re on their eyes, their skin, their flippers, everywhere. And turtles at the bottom of the ocean would just be dying there with these tumors.”
He began scouring the internet for an answer. The turtles had a disease called fibropapillomatosis, or FP for short. It affects up to 97% of all sea turtles, but according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists don’t fully understand what causes the disease to spread.
That disappointing Google search started a two-and-a-half-year investigation into Springer. Green sea turtles are critical to the health of reefs around the world, as they eat algae that would otherwise kill the coral. Ultimately, FP threatens coral reefs everywhere, which are already stressed by rising ocean temperatures and acidity.
Springer may have succeeded in rooting the spread of the disease in Oahu. Even better, he found a clear solution.
Last week he won the $10,000 Peggy Scripps Prize for Science Communication for his work, which he presented at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair along with over a thousand students. The money is for post-secondary education, but he hopes the prize will also bring attention to FP and the plight of sea turtles.
“It was an incredible feeling, just to have my research validated,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I felt that some change can be made in my research.”
Solving a biological mystery
At the start of his investigation, Springer applied for permits that would allow him to biopsy the turtles’ tumors. But he was rejected.
He decided not to give up, he tried to find a non-invasive way to do his research. He donned his diving gear and set up underwater motion-sensing cameras to photograph green sea turtles.
The tumors caused by FP can only form internally if they have already formed externally, so these pictures gave him a census of all the FP-infected turtles in Kāne’ohe Bay. The data confirmed his previous observations – FP was very common.
But the herpesvirus that causes FP must be activated by an external factor before it can produce these tumors. Previous biopsies of green sea turtle tumors had shown high levels of the amino acid arginine. That might have been the trigger, but where would the turtles get so much arginine?
Sea turtles’ main food source is algae, and they do not eat pickling. They will eat whatever kind is available. Through a photo survey, Springer discovered that most of the algae in Kāne’ohe Bay are invasive.
This invasive algae is extremely good at absorbing sewage. In fact, it absorbs 11 times more than native algae and converts the nitrogen-rich wastewater into arginine, which algae stores in its tissues, Springer said.
In fact, Oahu had a likely source of sewage going into the ocean.
“In Kāne’ohe Bay, and in Hawaii as a whole, tailings are a huge problem,” Springer said.
Carriages are pits dug under houses to collect waste water. There are no barriers around them, so they forced water leeches into the porous, volcanic soil of Hawaii. At high tide, that waste water is drawn into the ocean.
400 hours of diving for algae
Springer had his doubts, but he had to test them.
So he spent his weekends and evenings after school collecting algae samples, drying them, and crushing them into a powder. Then, he sent them to a lab to run through a mass spectrometer, a machine that reveals the elements in a substance.
He was looking for a specific isotope of nitrogen associated with human sewage, and he found it. This confirmed that the algae were, in fact, absorbing waste water.
The sea turtle food was rich in arginine which causes FP.
After two and a half years and 400 hours of diving, Springer found a link between rampant FP in Kāne’ohe Bay and wastewater pollution.
Student research at ISEF is not held to the peer-reviewed standard that studies published in scientific journals such as Nature must meet. More research is needed to confirm the causal link that Springer may have discovered.
“I believe this study shows that there is a significant relationship between wastewater output and this disease,” said Springer. Without intervention, he fears this entire marine ecosystem will be destroyed.
Save Hawaii’s sea turtles
In total, there are 88,000 cesspools in Hawaii, with 11,000 on Oahu alone, according to the Hawaii Department of Health.
Springer says the solution is to get rid of these backwaters and divert residential wastewater to treatment facilities. That would keep this contaminated water from polluting Hawaii’s oceans and making sea turtles sick.
Building wastewater treatment facilities and the infrastructure needed to transport sewage to them would be expensive, Springer acknowledged. But based on his research, he thinks this is an issue that needs urgent attention.
“If we continue to go at this rate, and if we continue to release raw sewage into the bay, the environmental destruction will be unprecedented,” he said.
But it’s not just cost that stands in the way. In 2017, the Hawaii legislature passed Act 125, which protects the state from having to remove cesspools until 2050. Springer, that’s not nearly soon enough.
“Hawaii needs to step up, put the money down. I know it will be expensive, but in the end it will be worth it because 2050 is an unacceptable date, and it has to happen now or it will unexpected environmental destruction.” he said.
Currently, the state legislature is considering a bill that would begin imposing “pollution fees” on homeowners with cesspools by 2025. That money would go into a new fund to mitigate the effects of the cesspools, Honolulu reports Civil Beat.
It may be a step in the right direction, but Springer hopes his research will help draw more attention to the urgency of this issue.
“I really want to raise this issue, and that the only way this can be resolved is through government intervention,” he said.
Springer plans to further his scientific career at Oregon State University, where he will pursue a bachelor’s degree in marine biology.
“I’m excited to explore somewhere new, and do more research on new problems because research is based on problems,” he said. “I think it will be a fun way to further research and delve deeper into the issues that fundamentally govern our environment and run our ecosystem.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
