TAMU-CC Researcher Secures Texas Sea Grant to Investigate ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Texas Coast Sport Fish
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas – Spotted seatrout is the most popular recreational fish species on the Texas Gulf Coast, landing in coolers and on dinner tables from Sabine Lake to Port Isabel. However, no one has established a baseline for how much PFAS contamination those fish may carry. Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi’s Dr. Frauke Seemann, Associate Professor and Marine Biology Graduate Program Coordinator, intends to change that.
Seemann received approximately $380,000 through the Texas Sea Grant College Program for her project, “Impacts of PFAS Exposure on Spotted Seatrout Populations.” The grant, which runs through January 31, 2028, supports both field sampling along the Texas coast and controlled laboratory exposure experiments. The goal is to answer questions about a class of chemicals which has drawn increasing public concern.
“They’re in our household items, in pesticides, in the air, in the soil, and in the water,” Seemann said. “It’s ubiquitous, and the major contributor is our overall lifestyle.”
Polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are synthetic compounds used across a vast range of industrial and consumer applications. Flame retardants alone account for roughly 1,500 EPA-designated chemical compounds, and the real number in industrial use is likely far higher. These so-called “forever chemicals” are hydrophobic, meaning they resist water — leading them to absorb into biological tissue. As new contamination continuously enters Texas’ bays through agricultural runoff, sewage effluent, and household products, accumulation in fish tissue can build steadily over time and the half-life of these chemicals ranges from roughly three months to five years.
Field work sends Seemann’s team to boat ramps along the Texas coast, collecting muscle and liver tissue from adult seatrout with the help of recreational fishermen. Andy Rizzo ’30, a doctoral student on Seemann’s team, was encouraged by how little persuading those anglers needed.
“Not a single fisherman refused to give us samples,” Rizzo said.
It helps that the samples researchers were looking for — liver tissue and small muscles — usually end up discarded as part of the cleaning process. Some anglers have even shared that they’ve noticed troubling signs in the fish they clean and welcomed the idea of a university research lab looking into this topic. Outreach events conducted in Corpus Christi, Galveston, and South Padre Island ahead of the sampling season, supported by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) and Sea Grant extension agents, have already generated interest from the fishing community.
“People are interested,” Rizzo said. “They appreciate that someone is trying to address the issue.”
Collaborators Dr. Hussain Abdullah of TAMU-CC’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Dr. Ramon Lavado at Baylor University will lead the chemical analysis of those samples.
Back in the lab, Seemann’s team is collaborating with the TPWD Development Center and Dr. Chris Mace, Director of the Coastal Conservation Agency (CCA) Marine Development Center in Flour Bluff, which supplies freshly fertilized spotted seatrout eggs. Researchers will expose embryos in the lab to PFAS for two-week windows and monitor development, mirroring earlier work which revealed troubling immune system consequences from brief early-stage PFAS exposure.
“We were able to show that the immune system is compromised in the adult females,” Seemann said. “They had been exposed for only a very short duration when they were larvae, and when they grew up, they still showed adverse effects.”
Those findings are especially concerning, given what researchers already know about PFAS in humans, including evidence linking the chemicals to reduced vaccine effectiveness in children. Seemann is deliberate about how she frames the project’s purpose. The goal is not to alarm the public or restrict behavior, but to give people the information they need to weigh their own risk.
“We want to make people aware of the consequences,” Seeman said. “It’s informed decision making, and we provide the baseline for that.”
Rizzo, an international student from Argentina pursuing a Ph.D. in marine biology, came to TAMU-CC to join Seemann’s lab after she researched PFAS as an undergraduate in North Carolina. She compares the chemicals to another pollutant people already understand — mercury.
The chemicals’ persistence in the environment is matched by the difficulty of regulating them. Older PFAS compounds have been phased out under EPA rules, but replacement formulations — engineered to be chemically similar while theoretically less toxic — have followed them into widespread use.
“Those replacement compounds actually have the same toxic profile,” Seeman said.
Rizzo, whose research focuses specifically on comparing older compounds to their newer replacements, believes distinguishing between them is central to the project.
“We want to see if these newer compounds are as safe as they’re being promoted to be,” Rizzo said.
Only two prior studies have examined these chemicals in fish along the U.S. coast, one in Galveston Bay and one along the North Carolina coast, where elevated levels prompted consumption advisories for local anglers. The Texas coast has no equivalent data.
A companion project studying PFAS in shrimp and oysters will run concurrently, meaning the full funding cycle will produce a layered picture of forever chemical distribution across multiple levels of the Texas marine food web.
Seemann’s work is one of five projects funded through Texas Sea Grant’s 2026-28 cycle, which distributed $1.9 million across universities throughout the state, including two at TAMU-CC.
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