Perpetual Innovation

Category: biomagnification

  • Microplastics everywhere… Blow’n in the Wind…

    Here is an article in ARS Technica about an article in Nature Geoscience (2019) that talks about microplastics in the French The Pyrenees Mountains, a pristine place, except for, well, plastic!

    The researchers made extremely controlled efforts to assure that they were not contaminating the samples gathered. But the plastics are coming in on the wind, and coming down (mainly, it seems) in perpetration. 

    If microplastics are everywhere, then our impacts on the planet are far more, and far more prevasive than anyone has predicted. The ARS Technica article by 
    –

    original article, remember the whole biomagnification thing. That’s where fish each plants and plankton with plastics, Bigger fish eat those fish, and BIGGER animals like sharks, bears and humans, eat the biggest fish. The heavy metals, plastics and more will build up and up as they go up the food chain. And they tend to be retained at the highest order.

    Sources: Nature Geoscience, 2019. DOI: 10.1038/s41561-019-0335-5  (About DOIs).

  • Biomagnification: Pollutants Found in Deep-Sea Animals

    Okay, we all know how biomagnification works. Pollutants including heavy metals such as mercury are absorbed at the bottom of the food chain, and then they are amplified all the way to the top of the food chain. at the top of the chain are such animals as sharks at sea and lions on land.
    In terms of mercury biomagnification (wikipedia) works like this. Organisms absorb mercury very efficiently, but it takes far longer to excrete. Algae absorb mercury from seawater readily, so even small amounts in the water are absorbed and retained. Fish eat the algae, bigger fish eat the smaller fish, and so on. At all levels the mercury is retained (in fatty tissues) at a far better rate then it is excreted. Ultimately it accumulates and amplifies in predator fish like swordfish and sharks as well as birds of prey like eagles and osprey.  And, of course, at the apex of the food chain is humans. A mother breast feeding would, of course, pass it on in concentration to her baby.
    See fish you should avoid eating (very much of) here.
    It turns out that we are building up pollutants at the bottom of the ocean at an ugly and alarming rate. This is emphatically demonstrated by a recent study in Nature. An easier short read is in the WSJ by Kincaid.  Animals at the bottom of the ocean (4 miles deep) had amazingly high concentrations of pollutants, 50 times more than one of the worst polluted rivers in the world (in China). The pollutants included chemicals that don’t naturally decay but have not been produced (much) in decades. These POPs should mostly be in landfills; they were largely used in electronics. But they will continue to reek havoc to the environment for centuries to come.
    With about 65% of POPs in landfills, there’s a huge amount out sloshing around in the environment, all the way from the North Pole to the Mariana Trench. Plus, as the landfills fail, as they always do, eventually, … That’s ugly… so very ugly…
    Sorry, no positive spin for this. Not enough lipstick to cover this ugly pig.

    Reference

    Jamieson,
    A. J., Malkocs, T., Piertney, S. B., Fujii, T., & Zhang, Z. (2017, February
    13). Bioaccumulation of persistent organic pollutants in the deepest ocean
    fauna. Nature Ecology & Evolution,
     1(51). doi:10.1038/s41559-016-0051 Retrieved
    from: http://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-016-0051

  • Top 15 Contaminated Fish You Shouldn’t be Eating

    Top 15 Contaminated Fish You Shouldn’t be Eating:

    What’s the USDA recommendation for Mercury intake?

    If you eat some of these fish, you will exceed safe levels if you eat it more than once every couple weeks. Sharks and swordfish I new about, but others in the list are a real eye-opener.

    Biomagnification is where toxic chemicals such as mercury build up more and more as it moves up the food chain (to humans).

    This is a really good article with lots of good information on sustainability and safe eating levels of fish.

    Maybe salmon will move up on many people’s list. Sustainable, wild would be best, of course.

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