Food Web–Specific Biomagnification of Persistent Organic Pollutants

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) - Tập 317 Số 5835 - Trang 236-239 - 2007
Barry C. Kelly1,2, Michael G. Ikonomou1,2, Joel D. Blair1,2, Anne E. Morin1,2, Frank A. P. C. Gobas1,2
1Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Institute of Ocean Sciences, Ocean Sciences Division, 9860 West Saanich Road, Sidney, British Columbia, V8L 4B2, Canada.
2School of Resource and Environmental Management, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6, Canada

Tóm tắt

Substances that accumulate to hazardous levels in living organisms pose environmental and human-health risks, which governments seek to reduce or eliminate. Regulatory authorities identify bioaccumulative substances as hydrophobic, fat-soluble chemicals having high octanol-water partition coefficients ( K OW )(≥100,000). Here we show that poorly metabolizable, moderately hydrophobic substances with a K OW between 100 and 100,000, which do not biomagnify (that is, increase in chemical concentration in organisms with increasing trophic level) in aquatic food webs, can biomagnify to a high degree in food webs containing air-breathing animals (including humans) because of their high octanol-air partition coefficient ( K OA ) and corresponding low rate of respiratory elimination to air. These low K OW –high K OA chemicals, representing a third of organic chemicals in commercial use, constitute an unidentified class of potentially bioaccumulative substances that require regulatory assessment to prevent possible ecosystem and human-health consequences.

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Tài liệu tham khảo

United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) Final Act of the Conference of Plenipotentiaries on The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants Stockholm Sweden 22 to 23May2001 (UNEP Geneva Switzerland 2001).

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Materials and methods are available as supporting material on Science Online.

“Food web” is defined as the network of organisms and species-specific feeding relationships that control the flow of energy and contaminants in the ecosystems studied. In some cases we use the term “food chain” to represent the overall transfer of contaminants from primary producers to top predators of a given food web (e.g. marine mammalian food chain: phytoplankton to invertebrate to fish to mammal).

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We thank M. Kwan S. Sang B. Doidge D. Muir J. Arnot J. Armitage M. Fischer N. Crewe and M. Gibbs. We acknowledge the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Environment Canada's Northern Ecosystems Initiative for financial support Fisheries and Oceans Canada for chemical analysis support and northern Quebec Inuit communities of Umiujaq and Inukjuaq for assistance with collection of field samples.

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American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Tập 317 Số 5835

236-239

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