Emerging and legacy organophosphate flame retardants in the tropical estuarine food web: Do they exhibit similar bioaccumulation patterns, trophic partitioning and dietary exposure?

Emerging organophosphate flame retardants (E-OPFRs) are a new class of pollutants that have attracted increasing attention, but their bioaccumulation patterns and trophodynamic behaviors in aquatic food webs still need to be validated by comparison with legacy OPFRs (L-OPFRs). In this study, we simultaneously investigated the bioaccumulation, trophic transfer, and dietary exposure of 8 E-OPFRs and 10 L-OPFRs in a tropical estuarine food web from Hainan Island, China. Notably, the ΣL-OPFRs concentration (16.1-1.18 × 10 lipid weight (lw)) was significantly greater than that of ΣE-OPFRs (nondetectable (nd) - 2.82 × 10 ng/g lw) among the investigated organisms, and they both exhibited similar trends: fish