HACKENSACK, N.J. – On frozen Lake Hopatcong, a father and son plumb the waters for perch and pickerel. For 30 years, they’ve been casting lines in streams tucked amid New Jersey’s busy highways. Wherever they go, they find the same warning: Beware of the fish. Beware of mercury.

In Paterson, N.J., a nutritionist warns an expectant mother that swordfish, mackerel and the trusty tuna sandwich – the seafood doctors always said was part of a healthy diet – could harm her baby. Those fish contain a poison: mercury.

In New Brunswick, N.J., a woman strums her guitar. Five years ago, after she swore off meat and chicken in favor of tuna and swordfish, her hand began to tremble. It quivered so much that playing the guitar became difficult. So did drawing a straight line. Her hair began to fall out. Hair and blood tests revealed the culprit: mercury.

The nation’s smokestacks aren’t just polluting the air – they are contaminating our waters, and our bodies.

The mercury that rises from those industrial stacks floats through the atmosphere and settles in rivers, lakes and oceans, contaminating fish and finding its way to dinner tables across the nation. A growing number of studies document the human toll: Children exposed to mercury are slower to walk and talk and may be more susceptible to autism and attention deficit disorders. Adults can suffer memory loss, nerve damage and fatigue.

Nationwide, advisories about mercury contamination cover 500,000 miles of river, more than 12 million acres of lakes and much of the Atlantic coastline.

Because of contaminated fish, 630,000 unborn children – nearly twice original estimates – are exposed to unsafe mercury levels each year, the federal Environmental Protection Agency said last month. These children can suffer irreversible changes in the brain and nervous system.

The Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency have issued an advisory warning pregnant and nursing women and young children to eat albacore tuna no more than once a week because of mercury poisoning.

It doesn’t have to be this way, environmental officials say. The technology exists to reduce drastically the mercury emitted by coal-fired power plants, the largest source of the pollutant in the country.

Indeed, in just three years, mercury emissions could be slashed by 90 percent, they say.

But the Bush administration is pushing a controversial plan that would do less, environmentalists say. President Bush’s proposal gives utilities 14 years to cut their mercury emissions by 70 percent. It also allows plants to buy and sell the right to pollute.

“It provides incentives to do more than required,” EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt told power producers earlier this year, “and serious market-imposed sanctions for those who do less.”

Environmentalists say it will create “hot spots” around power plants that buy the right to keep pumping out mercury rather than cleaning up.

America’s coal-fired power plants – in the Ohio River Valley, on the shores of the Great Lakes, in Jersey City and elsewhere – spew 48 tons of mercury into the air a year. The mercury in these plumes is unregulated. The government forced waste incinerators to reduce their emissions, but the utilities have not been required to do the same.

The toxic plumes can travel hundreds of miles before falling to earth in snowflakes, soot and rain, and then wash into lakes and streams in runoff.

A crucial transformation takes place when mercury reaches the sediments of these waters. Bacteria there change the mercury into methylmercury, which then enters the food chain when the bacteria are consumed by plankton. Those tiny creatures are then eaten by small fish, which are eaten by larger fish, and so on.

The higher mercury rises in the food chain, the more concentrated it becomes. The mercury in trout, for instance, can be a million times more concentrated than in the surrounding water. Cooking or cleaning will not remove the contamination.

At the top of the food chain are anglers like Chuck Snover Sr., who stood with his 16-year-old son on frozen Lake Hopatcong last month. A fat, striped perch flopped in its death throes on the ice before being dropped on a small charcoal stove.

Father and son fish most weekends. Sometimes, it’s slim pickings. But lately, the fish have all but jumped out of the lake. A week ago, a cousin fishing with the pair caught 52. The week before, they took 50.

“We eat what we can catch,” says Snover, 41, of Hackettstown, N.J. Asked about the state’s warning advisories, he says most anglers – and there are 1 million of them in New Jersey – ignore them.

“I don’t know whether we are uneducated about it or uncaring,” he says. “I guess the thought is you can get hit by a truck on the road any moment.”

A study five years ago of Hudson River anglers confirmed his observation. Despite fish advisories by New Jersey and New York state, the fishermen still routinely ate their catch and shared it with their families, Mount Sinai School of Medicine researchers found. Those who ate their take more frequently had significantly higher mercury, as well as other chemicals, in their blood and hair.

Now the same scientists are midway through a five-year study of 168 fishermen from the Englewood Boat Basin, a Ridgefield fishing club, and piers in Bayonne, Elizabeth and New York City. With detailed questionnaires and blood and hair samples, they’re hoping to help answer a fundamental question: What is the human cost of mercury?

Mercury inflicts its greatest damage upon hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting pregnant women and their unborn children throughout the United States.

New research suggests that nearly one woman in six in the United States may have unsafe levels of mercury in her body – ironically because of the fish eaten to stay healthy.

Last week’s warnings on commercial fish advised young children and women who are pregnant, nursing or considering having a baby not to eat shark, swordfish, king mackerel or tilefish.

Other guidelines recommended they:

• Eat up to two meals a week (12 ounces in all) of a variety of fish and shellfish that are low in mercury. Those include shrimp, canned light tuna, salmon, pollock and catfish.

• Follow state advisories on locally caught fish. If there are no advisories, limit fish consumption that week to just 6 ounces of the locally caught fish.

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Environmentalists say the warnings should be stronger. But the FDA must balance mercury concerns with overall nutrition. Fish that aren’t laden with mercury provide many health benefits, especially for the heart.

That’s the message that Alyce Thomas, a prenatal nutrition consultant, tries to convey to women with high-risk pregnancies at St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center in Paterson. But there’s a lot of ground to cover, she says: Just getting enough to eat is important, as is avoiding alcohol. Add the problems of diabetes and high blood pressure, and fish advisories don’t get a lot of airtime.

But on this Monday morning, Thomas tells Helen Vasquez of Prospect Park about mercury.

“Fish contains mercury, which can build up in the body. They don’t know how much is too much,” Thomas tells the 20-year-old, whose baby is due in two months. She warns her to eat no more than one can of tuna a week.

“I never heard about the mercury,” says Vasquez. Thomas explains how the metal is put into the air by smokestacks and winds up in water, where it enters the food chain.

“Really?” Vasquez asks. “It gets into the fish?”

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New research in the United States and Japan now shows that mercury concentrates in umbilical cord blood, meaning that babies receive a higher exposure than their mothers, according to the EPA. If the EPA’s safety guidelines were adjusted to account for this difference, nearly one in six pregnant women would be considered at risk.

The most heartbreaking cases of mercury damage in children occurred in the Japanese town of Minimata, where mercury waste contaminated the fish that were the town’s main food supply. The impact on pregnant women themselves was slight, but their children were born retarded, deaf, blind, unable to speak or with cerebral palsy.

But for most of the thousands of babies who have been exposed in the womb, the effects are more subtle – so subtle that they probably will never be attributed to mercury. Although babies can be routinely tested for lead poisoning, their blood is not checked for mercury.

Dr. Michael Gochfeld, a mercury specialist at the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute in Piscataway, N.J., and a professor at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, doesn’t point to a bassinet in the hospital nursery and say a child suffers from “mercury poisoning.”

Instead, he points to a subtle loss of potential for thousands of children. “It might reduce IQ by a few points,” says Gochfeld, chairman of the state’s mercury task force. “It might reduce motor coordination, so that this child is someone we think of as a klutz. It might make them unmusical.”

Studies have shown that children born to mothers with high mercury levels were slower to talk, walk and develop fine motor skills. The research, conducted in the Faroe Islands of the remote North Atlantic, where fish and whale are dietary staples, found that children exposed to more mercury had weaker memories and attention spans. And the damage apparently is permanent. Follow-up studies when the children turned 14 showed that their brains had not recovered.

More worrisome, the damage was detected even at levels of exposure previously thought safe.

New findings from the Seychelles, a fish-eating island nation in the Indian Ocean, reveal a difference in brain activity for common actions, such as moving a hand. Earlier research there had shown no effects from mercury exposure. The latest results, presented at a medical conference in Hawaii last month, startled Dr. George Lambert, head of New Jersey’s Institute of Neurotoxicology and Environmental Assessment in Piscataway, part of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and Rutgers University.

A different side of the brain lit up in brain scans of children exposed to higher mercury levels. “It’s a rewiring of the brain,” Lambert says. “These are things we’re just beginning to understand.”

Mercury in the developing fetus causes permanent changes that depend upon what Lambert calls “windows of susceptibility”: how great the exposure, how long it lasts and what fetal development is taking place at that instant.

Mercury’s role in autism is also being explored in several studies at the institute. Does prenatal exposure to mercury heighten susceptibility? Does that lead to the regression seen in autism?

Animal studies at Lambert’s institute have found that even low levels of exposure harm brain cells – they don’t multiply as frequently, and they don’t form as many connections. “The exposure can be at low levels and just for a short period of time,” Lambert says. “It will have profound effects for the duration.”

The costs, when intelligence is lowered across a population, are high: A drop of just five IQ points because of mercury contamination doubles the number of children whose IQs fall below 70 and require remedial help. True geniuses, on the other hand, become merely “highly intelligent,” and society is deprived of the benefit of their brilliance because of mercury.

The diminished lifetime earnings, when measured over an entire society, amount to $2.3 billion a year, estimates Michael McCalley, a professor of community and preventative medicine at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

McCalley, president of the advocacy group Physicians for Social Responsibility, acknowledged that removing mercury from smokestacks is costly, but he said: “There are numbers on the other side. There are benefits.

“If the EPA proceeds with its mercury rule,” said McCalley, who testified last month against Bush’s mercury proposal, “we’ll have more children with lowered IQs who struggle to keep up in school, who may require remedial classes or special education, and whose lifelong earning capacity will be reduced.”

Mercury’s dangers have been recorded ever since hat makers in the mid-1800s used it as a felt stiffener, causing bizarre personality changes in those who inhaled the fumes – and inspiring the expression “mad as a hatter.”

In addition to mood changes, high mercury levels in the blood of adults have been linked, in various studies, with infertility, fatigue, headache, joint pain, and reduced memory and concentration.

A growing concern about mercury in the food chain has raised new questions. Are the health advantages of eating fish, which are low in cholesterol and full of good-for-you essential fatty acids, undercut by the increased risk of heart attack in those with high mercury levels? Two studies of middle-aged men have come up with different answers.

For Marilynn Winston, a diet rich in fish led to fatigue, a tremor, irritability and hair loss.

The vibrant 71-year-old still gets hungry describing the grilled, marinated tuna steaks, surrounded by portobello mushrooms, she used to make. About 10 years ago, having abandoned red meat, she also dropped poultry from her diet because of worries about its hormones and antibiotics. She dined daily on fish – and unwittingly sickened herself with mercury.

When a doctor couldn’t figure out what was wrong from standard blood tests, Winston visited a naturopath, a medical practitioner who uses non-invasive, natural medicine relying on nutrition and vitamins. A sample of her hair was analyzed, revealing high mercury levels. A subsequent blood test showed a mercury concentration more than six times what was considered safe.

She eliminated larger, predatory fish species from her diet, because they were likely to have the highest mercury concentrations. She took selenium supplements and herbs recommended by her son, an herbalist, to help rid the contamination from her body. She started eating chicken again.

Today, five years after she was diagnosed, her blood mercury has dropped back to a normal range, and Winston feels almost completely recovered: She can single-handedly lift a kayak, and she can dance until midnight again.

Unlike newborns, who can suffer permanent damage, adults can recover from mercury’s effects once the exposure ceases. In six to 12 weeks, a body can rid itself of half its burden of mercury.

For those who love fish, the best advice is to vary what they eat, choosing smaller species that are lower in mercury and taken from comparatively unpolluted waters. Fish that have tested lower for mercury include wild salmon, herring, sardines, shrimp, tilapia, and sole.

“I’m all for people eating fish,” Winston says. “They just shouldn’t poison themselves.”

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The question at the heart of the mercury fight is whether coal-fired plants around the country can make massive cuts to reduce pollution – and whether the huge costs are worth the health benefits.

The technology exists. Municipal and medical waste incinerators poured more than 5,000 pounds of mercury annually into American skies in the 1990s. Now, they have cut that to just 350 pounds.

At two South Jersey power plants in Swedesboro and Carneys Point, engineers for another utility have slashed emissions by 98 percent, said Bill O’Sullivan, the state’s director of air quality.

But cleaning up New Jersey’s coal-burning power plants won’t protect people from the pollution drifting in from other states. The DEP estimates that at least a third, and probably closer to half, of the total mercury pollution in the state comes from outside its borders. In Ohio, where the EPA and New Jersey have sued seven power plants because of the load of asthma-causing pollutants they send toward New Jersey, utilities pump 4 tons of mercury a year into the skies.

The coal mined from the earth naturally contains mercury. Burning it at high temperatures produces a plume with some pure mercury, in the form of free-floating atoms, and some bonded with other pollutants into soot particles.

The heavier soot particles drop from the sky quickly, causing so-called “hot spots” downwind of power plants.

Elemental mercury is lighter, floating along on the jet stream. Much of this falls to the ground, but a vast global current of mercury circulates above the earth, fed by smokestacks from countries such as China, Ukraine and the United States.

The Bush administration proposed in December to reduce pollution in the United States through a “cap and trade” system that would let the market dictate where and how power plants clean up.

It’s a proven system that has cut acid rain emissions by 40 percent since the 1990s, supporters say. “Those principles ought to work for mercury as well,” says Scott Segal, an electric power industry spokesman in Washington.

Power companies would have the flexibility and incentive to find cheaper, innovative ways of cleaning up, he says. They would have the time they need to buy and install pollution equipment at hundreds of plants. That would help overcome one of the biggest hurdles – the quirkiness of coal. Hunks taken from the same mine can have surprisingly different chemical compositions. A system that vacuums up mercury from one variety may have problems with another.

The cost of mercury controls alone is unclear, but the EPA estimates that utilities will have to spend $50 billion over the next 20 years for the air quality improvements the White House promises.

If an immediate cleanup were ordered, says Segal, some utilities would sue. The tough stance environmentalists want “does not get you a 90 percent reduction in three years,” he warns. “What it gets is litigation in three years.”

In a windowless Philadelphia conference hall, the battle over mercury boiled over last month at an EPA hearing. Segal and representatives of other utilities defended the trading proposal, but they were outnumbered by a parade of parents, environmentalists, academics, and state officials who said the White House was trading children’s safety for corporate profits.

“The laggards in the industry are being rewarded by this rule,” complained Bradley Campbell, New Jersey’s commissioner of environmental protection. Power and coal companies “hid in the bushes until the Bush administration quashed the controls that they wanted quashed, and now they’re being held to a standard that’s very weak.”

Officials from Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York also criticized the plan. The measure faces a certain legal challenge if adopted, said an assistant attorney general for New York state.

For New Jersey, this is a familiar battleground. The state has been in court for years against coal-fueled plants in the Midwest and South, trying to force them to add smokestack controls to cut the smog and soot they send drifting toward the skies of other states.

Even the EPA’s own advisers say the plan is inadequate. In January, a panel of scientists who counsel the agency on children’s issues warned that trading might worsen some mercury hot spots and create new ones.

“The concern,” wrote the 27-member Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, “is that this proposed action does not go as far as is feasible to reduce mercury emissions from power plants and therefore does not sufficiently protect our nation’s children.

“While cost-effectiveness is important, the priority should be to protect our children’s health in a timely manner.”

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Back on Lake Hopatcong, the buzz of a power augur breaks the silence. Brian Opeka clutches the drill as its blade cuts into the ice.

Opeka, 40, has been ice fishing New Jersey’s waters with his father since he was 10. He loves the patient routine, the long days spent sitting over a shimmering hole in the ice, waiting for a line to quiver.

Mercury has added another tradition, though: “In the last 10 years, we haven’t taken a fish,” says Opeka’s 73-year-old dad, John. “No matter how big, how small, we measure em, take a picture, and put em back.”

But it’s possible to reclaim these waters. In Florida, scientists found that mercury levels in Everglades fish and wading birds dropped by up to 70 percent over the last 10 years after nearby industries added emission controls. In New Jersey, studies of lakes and marshes found that the amount of mercury leaching into sediments has been reduced, thanks to decreased burning of coal and garbage in our homes.

This month, state officials unveiled a systematic plan to monitor how chemical contamination in the state’s fish progresses over time.

“How long does it take the lake to recuperate?” John Opeka wonders, as he perches on a stool over the ice. How long will it take to make the fish safe?