Evaluation of a marine mammal status and trends contaminants indicator for European waters

Williams, R. S. et al. (2023) Evaluation of a marine mammal status and trends contaminants indicator for European waters. Science of the Total Environment, 866, 161301. (doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.161301) (PMID:36592909)

Abstract

Marine mammals are vulnerable to the bioaccumulation, biomagnification and lactational transfer of specific types of pollutants, such as industrial polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), due to their long-life spans, feeding at a high trophic level and unique fat stores that can serve as depots for these lipophilic contaminants. Currently, European countries are developing indicators for monitoring pollutants in the marine environment and assessing the state of biodiversity, requirements under both Regional Seas Conventions and European legislation. As sentinel species for marine ecosystem and human health, marine mammals can be employed to assess bioaccumulated contaminants otherwise below current analytical detection limits in water and lower trophic level marine biota. To aid the development of Regional Seas marine mammal contaminants indicators, as well as Member States obligations under descriptor 8 of the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive, the current study aims to further develop appropriate methodological standards using data collected by the established UK marine mammal pollutant monitoring programme (1990 to 2017) to assess the trends and status of PCBs in harbour porpoises. Within this case study, temporal trends of PCB blubber concentration in juvenile harbour porpoises were analysed using multiple linear regression models and toxicity thresholds for the onset of physiological (reproductive and immunological) endpoints were applied to all sex-maturity groups. Mean PCB blubber concentrations were observed to decline in all harbour porpoise Assessment Units and OSPAR Assessment Areas in UK waters. However, a high proportion of animals were exposed to concentrations deemed to be a toxicological threat, though the relative proportion declined in most Assessment Units/Areas over the last 10 years of the assessment. Recommendations were made for improving the quality of the assessment going forward, including detailing monitoring requirements for the successful implementation of such an indicator.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: The authors would like to thank the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Devolved Governments of Scotland and Wales for funding the Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme (CSIP) as part of the UK government's commitment to a number of international conservation agreements. The authors would also like to thank the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Sciences for carrying out the chemical analysis and Defra for funding this analysis under a service-level agreement. The authors thank ASCOBANS and Natural Resources Wales for funding some of the pollutant analyses. The authors would like to thank Fiona Read, the Sea Mammal Research Unit and the Natural History Museum for their help in verifying the classification of a number of age classes. RW was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) grant NE/L002485/1 and grant NE/ S000100/1 supporting the ChemPop project. RW, RD, MP, PDJ were partially funded by Research England. This project was carried out with the support of the Irish Marine Institute (Grant Agreement No SERV-21- MEFS-150) under the EMFF Operational Programme.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: ten Doeschate, Mariel and Davison, Mr Nick and Brownlow, Dr Andrew

Creator Roles

Brownlow, A.: Conceptualization, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – review and editing
Davison, N.: Investigation, Data curation, Writing – review and editing
ten Doeschate, M.: Investigation, Data curation, Writing – review and editing

• Authors: Williams, R. S., Brownlow, A., Baillie, A., Barber, J. L., Barnett, J., Davison, N. J., Deaville, R., ten Doeschate, M., Penrose, R., Perkins, M., Williams, R., Jepson, P. D., Lyashevska, O., and Murphy, S.
• College/School: College of Medical Veterinary and Life Sciences > School of Biodiversity, One Health & Veterinary Medicine
• Journal Name: Science of the Total Environment
• Publisher: Elsevier
• ISSN: 0048-9697
• ISSN (Online): 1879-1026
• Published Online: 31 December 2022