A Dartmouth-University of Connecticut study of the northeast United States shows that methylmercury concentrations in estuary waters -- not in sediment as commonly thought -- are the best way to predict mercury contamination in the marine food chain.
Background:Mercury released into the air through industrial pollution is turned into its most toxic form, methylmercury (MeHg), by microbial activity in coastal sediment, streams and oceans. Once transformed, MeHg bioaccumulates and bioamagnifies in marine food webs. Lower trophic level fauna are important conduits of MeHg from sediment and water to estuarine and coastal fish harvested for human consumption. However, the sources and pathways of MeHg to these coastal fisheries are poorly known.
The new study:
The Dartmouth-UConn team studied 10 estuaries from New Jersey's Hackensack Meadowlands to the Gulf of Maine with different levels of anthropogenic mercury input. They collected water, sediment and biotic samples such as worms, mussels and fish and analyzed them for inorganic mercury and MeHg.
Dartmouth Professor Celia Y. Chen
(Photo Credit: Dartmouth College)
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The researchers found that methylmercury concentrations in the water, not the sediment, predicted methylmercury concentrations in killifish and Atlantic silversides, and that concentrations were higher in these forage fish than in bottom-feeding worms. Concentrations in sediment only predicted contamination levels in the worms.
"Our paper shows methylmercury's impact on food webs is not simply based on sediment contamination but is far more complex and appears based on the flux of methylmercury from sediments to the water column or even methylmercury transported via water from other parts of the watershed," says
Professor Celia Chen, principal investigator and a project leader of
Dartmouth's Toxic Metals Superfund Research Program.
The findings suggest that mercury assessment and remediation, which currently focus on sediment contamination, should instead focus on measuring methylmercury in water column particles, which may be contaminated by the local pollution source or reflect sources outside of the specific estuary. "Our results across a broad range of sites demonstrate that the pathways of methylmercury to lower level estuarine organisms are distinctly different between organisms in the sediment and forage fish," Chen says. "Thus, even in systems with contaminated sediments, transfer of methylmercury into estuarine food webs may be driven more by the amount of methylmercury available in the water column."
Source: Adapted from
Dartmouth College
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