An effort to restore the health of the one of the Island’s ponds has been successful, according to researchers.

Jamie Bacon, principal investigator of the Bermuda Amphibian Project, has said that efforts to remove dangerous hydrocarbons from one half of Cloverdale Pond have been successful, and the effort is now being extended to other areas.

“We seen that 96 to 100 per cent of the hydrocarbons are gone,” Dr Bacon said.

“That side of the pond at this stage is healthy. The other side is the same, but it works.

“We have now started work at Evan’s Pond and it’s full speed ahead.”

Earlier this year, Dr Bacon told the Hamilton Rotary Club that a recent study had found an alarming number of deformities in the Island’s toads, terrapins and killifish, which had been linked to petroleum hydrocarbons and heavy metals in pond sediment.

In an effort to combat the issue, researchers with the assistance of HSBC’s Global Water Programme attempted two different strategies at Cloverdale Pond, aerating the sediment and installing OpFlex foam — which absorbs many forms of hydrocarbons and heavy metals — in slipways which carry water from the road to the pond.

“What we are doing is gently aerating the sediment,” Dr Bacon said.

“This is providing oxygen to the bacteria that consume hydrocarbons that reside in the sediment.

“Our earlier tests showed that hydrocarbon consuming bacteria were living in the sediments, but that there was too little oxygen for them to work effectively. In the lab, aerating the sediment enabled them to reproduce and work much more quickly so we tried it on half of the pond at Cloverdale to see how it would work in the field.

“It is known to work elsewhere. Solar panels powering a compressor with two air lines connecting to two manifolds that distributed the air located at the surface of the sediment were installed last December and we began aerating the north side of the pond.”

She said that tests of sediment collected in August showed that 96 to 100 per cent of the toxic hydrocarbons were degraded, and the fish population of the pond had already begun to recover.

“Before we started aeration, the fish exposed to the Cloverdale pond sediment laid markedly fewer eggs than those exposed to safe lab sediment,” she said.

“We repeated the same test using pond sediment collected in August and the fish exposed to the pond sediment laid even slightly more eggs than those exposed to the safe lab sediment showing us that not only were the hydrocarbons essentially ‘gone’ but that the sediment was now much healthier for fish and other wildlife.”

Dr Bacon said the preliminary analyses regarding the use of OpFlex have been promising, but the results have not yet been confirmed because of the recent wet weather.

“We need to confirm this by removing the OpFlex and sediment from the soakaways for further tests,” she said.

“The problem is that we keep getting rain and the soakaways are flooded.

“Once they aren’t full of water, we can collect our samples.”