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Maddux Alexander Springer was freediving in Hawaii when he saw green sea turtles with huge tumors.
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He spent 2.5 years researching the disease and discovered its likely cause, plus a solution.
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He won a top prize at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, raising $10,000 for the university.
Maddux Alexander Springer spent his free time in the blue waters of Oahu.
Each day, the high school student would leave the seahorses, eels and octopuses in his home aquariums, walk a short distance to Kāne’ohe Bay and go freediving.
“It’s almost like you’re an alien,” Springer, who is now 18, told Business Insider. “You’re just there alone in this environment where you don’t really belong.”
But sometimes it seemed like he was diving through a graveyard. He kept seeing green sea turtles with cauliflower-like tumors.
“They were just gross masses ranging from the size of a penny to the size of a football. And it would just encapsulate the green sea turtles,” he said. “They’re all over their eyes, on their skin, on their fins. And there would just be turtles at the bottom of the ocean dying there with these tumors.”
He started searching 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 launched Springer into a two-and-a-half-year investigation. Green sea turtles are critical to the health of reefs worldwide because they eat algae that would otherwise smother the coral. Ultimately, FP poses a threat to coral reefs around the world, which are already under pressure from rising ocean temperatures and acidity.
Springer may have discovered the cause of the disease’s spread in Oahu. In fact, he found a clear solution.
Last week, he won the $10,000 Peggy Scripps Award for Science Communication for his work, which he presented alongside more than a thousand students at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair. The money is intended for post-secondary education, but he hopes the award will also draw attention to FP and the plight of sea turtles.
“It was an incredible feeling, just having my research validated,” he said. “It’s been a very long time since I felt like any change could be made in my research.”
Solving a biological mystery
Early in his research, Springer applied for permits that would allow him to biopsy the turtles’ tumors. But he was refused.
Determined not to give up, he looked for a non-invasive way to conduct his research. He donned his diving gear and set up motion-detecting underwater cameras to take pictures of green sea turtles.
The tumors caused by FP can only form internally if they have already formed externally, so these photos gave him a count of all FP-infected turtles in Kāne’ohe Bay. The data confirmed his earlier observations: FP was common.
But the herpes virus that causes FP must be activated by an external factor before it can produce these tumors. Previous biopsies of tumors from green sea turtles had shown that they contained high levels of the amino acid arginine. Maybe that was the trigger, but where would the turtles get so much arginine?
Algae are sea turtles’ main food source and they are not picky eaters. They eat whatever type 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 rich nitrogen from the wastewater into arginine, which the algae store in their tissues, Springer said.
Oahu did indeed have a likely source of sewage entering the ocean.
“In Kāne‘ohe Bay, and Hawaii in general, cesspools are a major problem,” Springer said.
Cesspools are pits dug under houses to collect wastewater. They have no barriers around them, allowing polluted water to enter Hawaii’s porous, volcanic soil. At high tide, that wastewater is sucked into the ocean.
400 hours of diving for algae
Springer had his suspicions, but he had to test them.
So he spent his weekends and evenings after school collecting algae samples, dried them and ground them into powder. He then sent them to a laboratory to run through a mass spectrometer, a machine that reveals the elements in a substance.
He looked for a specific isotope of nitrogen associated with human wastewater, and he found it. That confirmed that the algae were indeed absorbing wastewater.
The sea turtle food was rich in FP-causing arginine.
After two and a half years and 400 hours of diving, Springer discovered a link between rampant FP in Kāne’ohe Bay and wastewater pollution.
Student research at ISEF does not meet the peer-review standard that research published in scientific journals such as Nature must meet. More research is needed to confirm the causal relationship Springer may have discovered.
“I believe this study shows that there is a significant relationship between wastewater production and this disease,” Springer said. Without intervention, he fears this entire marine ecosystem will be destroyed.
Saving Hawaii’s sea turtles
According to the Hawaii Department of Health, there are a total of 88,000 cesspools in Hawaii, with 11,000 on Oahu alone.
Springer says the solution is to get rid of these cesspools and divert domestic wastewater to treatment plants. That would prevent this polluted water from polluting Hawaii’s oceans and making sea turtles sick.
Building wastewater treatment plants and the infrastructure needed to transport sewage there would be expensive, Springer admitted. But based on his research, he thinks this is a problem that needs urgent attention.
“If we continue at this rate and if we continue to dump raw sewage into the bay, the environmental devastation will be unprecedented,” he said.
But it’s not just the costs that stand in the way. In 2017, Hawaii’s legislature passed Act 125, which protects the state from cesspool removal until 2050. For Springer, that’s not nearly soon enough.
“Hawaii really needs to step up and 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 there will be unforeseen environmental destruction.” happen,” he said.
Currently, the state legislature is considering a bill that would begin imposing “pollution fees” on homeowners who have cesspools by 2025. That money would flow into a new fund to alleviate the impact of cesspools, Honolulu Civil Beat reports.
It may be a step in the right direction, but Springer hopes his research will help draw more attention to the urgency of this problem.
“I just want to raise awareness that this is a problem, and the only way it can be solved is through government intervention,” he said.
Springer plans to continue his scientific career at Oregon State University, where he will earn a bachelor’s degree in marine biology.
“I’m excited to explore something new and do more research on new problems that exist because research is problem-driven,” he said. “I feel like it will be a fun way to do more research and dig deeper into the issues that fundamentally control our environment and govern our ecosystem.”
Read the original article on Business Insider