An otter pokes its head above the water, checks out a gaggle of passing kayakers and then -- swish! -- disappears.
He descends back into a world of arsenic, copper, lead, mercury and zinc. A place of tributyltin, polychlorinated biphenyls, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and bis-2-ethylhexyl- phthalate.
All that and more are at the bottom of the Duwamish River, especially where the river otter surfaced, in front of two 8-by-10-foot discharge pipes on the river's east bank a scant half-mile from the West Seattle Bridge.
There, PCBs have been measured at some of their highest levels in the Duwamish. Research shows PCBs make male otters' penises and testes smaller. The chemicals also reduce otters' sperm counts.
Similarly, studies show that female snails exposed to extremely low levels of tributyltin grew penises.
A major new study by some of the Duwamish's biggest polluters and landowners -- The Boeing Co., Seattle, King County and Port of Seattle -- didn't consider the research on PCBs in otters.
As for the tributyltin, an ingredient in boat paint, the study said there might be a lot of that in the Duwamish, but there aren't many snails, and the growing of penises doesn't seem to affect female snails' reproduction. -- so let's not worry about that.
The river is a federal Superfund site -- one of the worst toxic messes in the country. The study by Boeing and the local governments will help determine how much of the tainted muck at the river's bottom must be hauled away. How pollution affects wildlife is supposed to be a key part of the equation.
But the study's take on the risk to wildlife has been attacked by scientists, environmentalists and community groups.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists hammered the study for underestimating risks to fish and wildlife from dioxins and the likely effects on young salmon from PCBs. They also attacked "the use of misleading language throughout" the document on PCBs, dioxins and furans. The state standards on which the cleanup is partially based, NOAA said, are not protective enough of fish.
Technical experts hired by the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition called the study "fatally flawed," saying it didn't consider enough types of animals and didn't do enough testing.
The critics say the study is naïve in assuming that the chemicals in the river act individually, rather than combining together to produce more -- or in some cases, less -- effect than they would individually.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency oversaw the study and stands behind it.
'With some uncertainties'
The river otter symbolizes an ongoing rebirth along the Duwamish. As the industrial excesses of the last century are ever so gradually corrected, residents are seeing more otters, more osprey, more animals in general.
Still, the level of PCBs in the fish and clams and other food eaten by otters in the Duwamish is three times what's thought to affect otters' growth. There are lots of probably overly protective assumptions built into that calculation, said the study by Boeing and the local governments, which concluded "risks to the river otter from PCBs were considered to be low, with some uncertainties."
"The ... consultants are paid to spin things in a way that says, 'This isn't good, but it's not that bad,' " Hoffman said. "We were often drafting and redrafting language not so much to change the content but to change the spin.
"The agency made a huge effort to address that."
The Duwamish study failed to consider research by Bob Grove, a U.S. Geological Survey biologist in Corvallis, Ore. He studied 303 river otters gathered in Oregon and Washington, measuring chemicals in their livers.
Grove found that PCBs in male otters are correlated with small penis size and testes, and fewer cells that help create sperm.
What's the big deal about penis size? Well, in an otter's world, size does seem to matter, Grove says. In order to get the female to ovulate, the otter's penis has to be long enough to penetrate the cervix.
The good news is that PCB concentrations have gone down in otters over time, Grove said. And otters using marginal habitat like the Duwamish tend to be young males that will move on to richer grounds. But lots of questions remain about how the battery of chemicals affects them.
"It's amazing how much these animals are exposed to, and how well they do deal with it," Grove said.
Despite not knowing about Grove's research, EPA already had agreed, based on lab studies of minks, to make Boeing and the local governments focus on the otter's plight, said Bruce Duncan, an EPA risk assessor.
To even consider using Grove's research as a basis for cleanup decisions, "we need to see it tied into some reproductive effects," such as fewer young being born, Duncan said.
When told of Grove's research, the coordinator of the cleanup coalition, BJ Cummings, said, "To leave out something like that is a major gap."
The consultants for Boeing and the local governments may not have heard about the otter researcher, but they did hear -- repeatedly -- from the federal scientists about other flaws in their study.
In April, NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service wrote that "many comments from our letter on the draft version ... have not been addressed."
The consultants obscured important information and tended to emphasize where their calculations were likely to be overprotective of animals, "rather than providing a balanced discussion of all the uncertainties," the agency wrote. The service also said: "The process and presentation should be more transparent."
An aquatic toxicologist at NOAA, Jim Meador, had big problems with the way the study treated the pollution-sensitive snails with confused sexuality. The authors of the report assumed there was little habitat suitable for them, "which I thought was kind of backwards," Meador said.
"Maybe if there wasn't a problem in the Duwamish, those snails would be there," he said. "I said, 'Look, maybe the more sensitive species have been wiped out and these are just the ones that survived.' "
Like many others, he is critical of the study for looking at each chemical's effect on animals, when different effects can occur when chemicals combine.
"It's quite a complex soup" the animals swim in, "and frankly the way it's approached is archaic, one compound at a time. They never consider mixtures," Meador said, although he acknowledged that is difficult to do.
Grove, the otter researcher, summed up that criticism: "If the animal's in a soup, you don't just look at the peas. You look at the carrots and potatoes and chicken or whatever's in there."