Fisheries Society of the British Isles honours New Forest academic who worked with Surfers Against Sewage and Amazonian tribes, and at Trump Tower, One World Trade Center and Hinkley Point C
A RESEARCH scientist who set up a nature reserve in the Amazon and has worked for Donald Trump is set to be honoured by the scientific community.
Dr Peter Henderson, who lives in Everton, has spent his academic career studying and working to protect fish populations around the world.
He has designed water intake systems for power plants in the US and Britain, as well as the One World Trade Center in New York and Trump Tower in Chicago, with the aim of preserving as many fish and crustaceans as possible.
Dr Henderson has also conducted one of the longest running surveys of fish populations in the Bristol Channel and has analysed data in a study of the origins of HIV in Africa.
He is set to be honoured with the Fisheries Society of the British Isles’ Le Cren award at a scientific symposium being held in Bilbao next week, from 15th to 19th July.
Discussing his work with the A&T, Dr Henderson said his interest in aquatic life stems from fishing in his teenage years when his parents moved to the New Milton area.
After earning a doctorate from Imperial College in London, one of his first jobs was studying the effects of Fawley power station’s water output on aquatic populations in Southampton Waters.
His work at Fawley Aquatic Research Laboratories began in 1979 on behalf of the central electricity generating board, before the power industry was privatised under Margaret Thatcher.
Dr Henderson went on to found Pisces Conservation Ltd with an academic colleague, continuing his work as a mathematical modeller and specialising in studying the effects of power plant water flow systems on fish populations.
“The problem with power stations is the hot water discharge killing fish and crustaceans,” explains Dr Henderson. “I worked at the electricity board for a number of years and was later given an offer to work in the Amazon, looking at the ecological impact of deforestation on fish and other aquatic wildlife. There’s a very intimate connection between forests and rivers in the Amazon.”
Dr Henderson was invited by an academic colleague to visit Manaus in Brazil to join a project to create what at the time was almost certainly the largest aquatic nature reserve in the world - the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve - which covers an area roughly the size of Wales in north west Brazil.
“I worked as a fisheries advisor on setting up that reservation,” he explained. “This was in the days of Margaret Thatcher. She told the people who oversee development deals in the government to stop chucking money into India and Bangladesh and to put it into preserving the Amazon.”
Dr Henderson recalls it took three full weeks to traverse the reserve by boat and that it had around 1,000 named locations within it.
“The reserve had to be sustainable, it had to give local people a home, and it had to have an eco-tourism side to things,” he said. “It’s possible to go on holidays to the reserve now to see fish and wildlife.
“It’s been eight years since I’ve been there and many of the people I worked with have now been killed in one way or another.
“There was a light airplane crash that killed 14 scientists I worked with when the plane ran out of fuel flying from Tefé to Mamirauá. This happened 10 to 15 years ago - the Amazon really is a place where you play the odds.”
After working on setting up the reserve, Dr Henderson was offered the position of senior research associate at the University of Oxford. In the 1980s and 90s, he helped academic colleagues model statistical data for a study of the origins of HIV in Africa.
“Because I specialise in statistical and mathematical analysis of ecological data my career seems a bit disjointed,” he joked.
Dr Henderson also recently worked on designing a cooling system for Trump Tower in Chicago.
“I would like to say I wish I weren't working on this because it’s all a bit too political for me,” he said. “But the project is about looking after the fish in the Chicago river. The tower has a water intake that runs up 90 storeys.”
Dr Henderson worked on water intake systems for nuclear power plants in the US and Britain, including Hinkley Point C.
He added: “I’ve also worked for a tribe of Amerindians living on the Amazon to help them when their waters were being affected by an inshore oil rig in the region.
“The drilling operations were reducing water quality and I worked to mitigate the issue. I really like doing a mix of practical and theoretical statistical modeling work.”
Dr Henderson designed the water intake system for the One World Trade Center in New York and has worked with Surfers Against Sewage on the west coast of the US. He has also worked for the American Non-Governmental Organisation the Sierra Club to improve pollution levels in lakes in the US.
Upon receiving the Le Cren award in honour of a lifetime of work studying and protecting fish, during which he has authored around 150 scientific papers, Dr Henderson said he plans to use his acceptance speech to call for young researchers to be allowed to conduct longer term studies.
“There’s a lot of pressure on scientists these days to work quickly,” he said. “Most young scientists can’t invest 20 to 30 years into a series of studies any more; they have to publish papers in two to three years and the shortening of timescales for studies like these is damaging.
“I will be talking about my life of research, including 45 years’ overseeing the collection of samples of fish from the Bristol Channel, which I believe is the largest data set of its kind in the world.”
Discussing the environment in general, Dr Henderson warned against people focusing on climate change above all other environmental and ecological concerns.
“It doesn't do us good to focus only on climate issues in the face of other concerns such as sewage,” he explained. “I’d say the greatest threat to our inshore fisheries now are our wretched water companies pumping sewage into them.
“Climate change is an issue, but it’s not the only one.”
He continued: “I think in the last few years we've got the balance wrong. For example, Hinkley Point C needs a water intake of 120m³ per second, which sucks up millions of fish and crustaceans.
“But during public enquiries, issues like that are given no consideration at all.”
Dr Henderson said the Hinkley Point C project required the purchase of a nearby farmer’s field so it could be flooded to provide water intake for the station’s cooling system - but the move also “drowned all the badgers”.
“The studies that had been conducted hadn’t considered those badgers and the impact of that flooding.
“But if you try to put an extension on your home that affects a nearby badger sett then it would be a case of, ‘You can’t do that.’
“At one of the Hinkley Point C meetings I heard a somewhat known figure for a national charity say, ‘**** the badgers’ because they just weren't on the agenda at all.”
Underlining his point that solutions to ecological issues are not always universally good, Dr Henderson gave examples of improperly sited wind farms, where turbines get so “gummed up” with dead bugs they stop working.
He gave another example from the US in which migratory birds began confusing a newly built solar panel farm for a water body where they could land.
“Of course the birds are not stupid enough to crash into the panels, but they do still have to land.
“Unfortunately, the local coyotes figured this out and would lie in wait for the birds under the panels.
“This is what I mean about having to look at ecological solutions from all angles and understand there's no one size fits all solution.”
