Question: In what types of water do you test?

Lauren Laing answered on 11 Mar 2016:

Hi!
Mainly we test waters which fish have been exposed to, such as river water from different locations. We are most interested in chemicals such as heavy metals (copper, arsenic, iron, and cadmium), pharmaceutical medicines (the contraceptive pill, painkillers etc), pesticides and chemicals leached from plastics!

We don’t actually do the water testing in Exeter, we know some really great scientists who we work with to do this, mainly we look at the fishes’ DNA, and try to understand how chemicals effect the way their gene work.