Unlabelled: Allometric relationships between body properties of animals are useful for a wide variety of purposes, such as estimation of biomass, growth, population structure, bioenergetic modelling and carbon flux studies. This study summarizes allometric relationships of zooplankton and nekton species that play major roles in polar marine food webs. Measurements were performed on 639 individuals of 15 species sampled during three expeditions in the Southern Ocean (winter and summer) and 2374 individuals of 14 species sampled during three expeditions in the Arctic Ocean (spring and summer).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMonitoring plastic in stomachs of beached northern fulmars for OSPAR's Ecological Quality Objectives (EcoQOs) has been incorporated into the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). This paper aims to provide the appropriate tools to interpret the monitoring results. MSFD requires a data-derived threshold value (Fulmar-TV) representing 'Good Environmental Status'.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough ingestion of plastic by tubenosed seabirds has been documented regularly, identification of the polymer composition of these plastics has rarely been described. Polymer assessment may assist in identifying sources and may indicate risks from additives occurring in specific types of polymers. Using known test materials, two identification methods Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and near infrared spectroscopy (FTIR and NIR) were compared.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis review quantifies plastic interaction in marine biota. Firstly, entanglement and ingestion records for all marine birds, mammals, turtles, fish, and invertebrate species, are summarized from 747 studies. Marine debris affected 914 species through entanglement and/or ingestion.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study combines published datasets with unpublished data on plastic ingestion in several North Sea fish species. The combined dataset of 4389 individuals from 15 species allows the analysis of spatial distribution and temporal variability of plastic uptake in fish. Airborne fibre contamination was observed to be the main contributor to fibres encountered in the samples.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe risk of marine organisms ingesting plastics has become a growing concern due to hazard chemicals in plastics. To identify compounds to which seabirds potentially have substantial exposure, 194 plastics fragments and pellets ingested by seabirds, i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudies investigating the effects of plastic litter on marine biota have almost exclusively utilised pristine plastic materials that are homogeneous in polymer type, size, shape and chemical composition. This is particularly the case for microplastics (<5 mm), where collecting sufficient quantities from the marine environment for use in laboratory impacts studies is simply not feasible. Weathered plastics collected from the marine environment show considerable physical and chemical differences to pristine and post-production consumer plastics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnderstanding the energy flux through food webs is important for estimating the capacity of marine ecosystems to support stocks of living resources. The energy density of species involved in trophic energy transfer has been measured in a large number of small studies, scattered over a 40-year publication record. Here, we reviewed energy density records of Southern Ocean zooplankton, nekton and several benthic taxa, including previously unpublished data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHow the abundant pelagic life of the Southern Ocean survives winter darkness, when the sea is covered by pack ice and phytoplankton production is nearly zero, is poorly understood. Ice-associated ("sympagic") microalgae could serve as a high-quality carbon source during winter, but their significance in the food web is so far unquantified. To better understand the importance of ice algae-produced carbon for the overwintering of Antarctic organisms, we investigated fatty acid (FA) and stable isotope compositions of 10 zooplankton species, and their potential sympagic and pelagic carbon sources.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStomach contents of harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) collected in the Netherlands between 2003 and 2013 were inspected for the presence of plastic and other man-made litter. In 654 stomach samples the frequency of occurrence of plastic litter was 7% with less than 0.5% additional presence of non-synthetic man-made litter.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOne of the recently recognised stressors in Arctic ecosystems concerns plastic litter. In this study, juvenile polar cod () were investigated for the presence of plastics in their stomachs. Polar cod is considered a key species in the Arctic ecosystem.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn their recent paper, Savoca and collaborators (2016) showed that plastic debris in the ocean may acquire a dimethyl sulfide (DMS) signature from biofouling developing on their surface. According to them, DMS emission may represent an olfactory trap for foraging seabirds, which explains patterns of plastic ingestion among procellariiform seabirds. This hypothesis is appealing, but some of the data that Savoca used to support their claim are questionable, resulting in a misclassification of species, as well as other decisions regarding the variables to include in their models.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn studies of plastic ingestion by marine wildlife, visual separation of plastic particles from gastrointestinal tracts or their dietary content can be challenging. Earlier studies have used solutions to dissolve organic materials leaving synthetic particles unaffected. However, insufficient tests have been conducted to ensure that different categories of consumer products partly degraded in the environment and/or in gastrointestinal tracts were not affected.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMarine plastic litter has become a major threat to wildlife. Marine animals are highly susceptible to entanglement and ingestion of debris at sea. Governments all around the world are being urged to monitor litter sources and inputs, and to mitigate the impacts of marine litter, which is primarily composed of plastics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnthropogenic debris contaminates marine habitats globally, leading to several perceived ecological impacts. Here, we critically and systematically review the literature regarding impacts of debris from several scientific fields to understand the weight of evidence regarding the ecological impacts of marine debris. We quantified perceived and demonstrated impacts across several levels of biological organization that make up the ecosystem and found 366 perceived threats of debris across all levels.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany wildlife studies use chemical analyses to explore spatio-temporal variation in diet, migratory patterns and contaminant exposure. Intrinsic markers are particularly valuable for studying non-breeding marine predators, when direct methods of investigation are rarely feasible. However, any inferences regarding foraging ecology are dependent upon the time scale over which tissues such as feathers are formed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAccelerated contamination of habitats with debris has caused increased effort to determine ecological impacts. Strikingly, most work on organisms focuses on sublethal responses to plastic debris. This is controversial because (i) researchers have ignored medical insights about the mechanisms that link effects of debris across lower levels of biological organization to disease and mortality, and (ii) debris is considered non-hazardous by policy-makers, possibly because individuals can be injured or removed from populations and assemblages without ecological impacts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFulmars are effective biological indicators of the abundance of floating plastic marine debris. Long-term data reveal high plastic abundance in the southern North Sea, gradually decreasing to the north at increasing distance from population centres, with lowest levels in high-arctic waters. Since the 1980s, pre-production plastic pellets in North Sea fulmars have decreased by ∼75%, while user plastics varied without a strong overall change.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo quantify the occurrence of ingested plastic in fish species caught at different geographical positions in the North Sea, and to test whether the fish condition is affected by ingestion of plastics, 1203 individual fish of seven common North Sea species were investigated: herring, gray gurnard, whiting, horse mackerel, haddock, atlantic mackerel, and cod. Plastic particles were found in 2.6% of the examined fish and in five of the seven species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAbundance of ingested debris by seals has been mentioned as a potential indicator of marine litter in the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). A sample of 107 stomachs, 100 intestines and 125 scats of harbour seals from the Netherlands was analysed for the presence of plastics. Incidence of plastic was 11% for stomachs, 1% for intestines, and 0% for scats.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn 2011, northern fulmars (Fulmarus glacialis) from Iceland were used to test the hypothesis that plastic debris decreases at northern latitudes in the Atlantic when moving away from major human centres of coastal and marine activities. Stomach analyses of Icelandic fulmars confirm that plastic pollution levels in the North Atlantic tend to decrease towards higher latitudes. Levels of pollution thus appear to link to regions of intense human coastal and marine activities, suggesting substantial current inputs in those areas.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe association of Antarctic krill Euphausia superba with the under-ice habitat was investigated in the Lazarev Sea (Southern Ocean) during austral summer, autumn and winter. Data were obtained using novel Surface and Under Ice Trawls (SUIT), which sampled the 0-2 m surface layer both under sea ice and in open water. Average surface layer densities ranged between 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe abundance of plastics in stomachs of northern fulmars from the North Sea is used in the OSPAR Ecological Quality Objective (EcoQO) for marine litter. The preliminary EcoQO defines acceptable ecological quality as the situation where no more than 10% of fulmars exceed a critical level of 0.1 g of plastic in the stomach.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe demonstrate that pelagic Antarctic seabirds show significant decreases in concentrations of some persistent organic pollutants. Trends in Adélie penguins and Southern fulmars fit in a general pattern revealed by a broad literature review. Downward trends are also visible in pelagic fish, contrasting sharply with steady or increasing concentrations in Antarctic benthic organisms.
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