Ciguatoxins (CTXs) are potent algal toxins that cause widespread ciguatera poisoning and are found ubiquitously in coral reef food webs. Here we developed an environmentally-relevant, experimental model of CTX trophic transfer involving dietary exposure of herbivorous fish to the CTX-producing microalgae Gambierdiscus polynesiensis. Juvenile Naso brevirostris were fed a gel-food embedded with microalgae for 16 weeks (89 cells g fish daily, 0.4 μg CTX3C equiv kg fish). CTXs in muscle tissue were detectable after 2 weeks at levels above the threshold for human intoxication (1.2 ± 0.2 μg CTX3C equiv kg). Although tissue CTX concentrations stabilized after 8 weeks (∼3 ± 0.5 μg CTX3C equiv kg), muscle toxin burden (total μg CTX in muscle tissue) continued to increase linearly through the end of the experiment (16 weeks). Toxin accumulation was therefore continuous, yet masked by somatic growth dilution. The observed CTX concentrations, accumulation rates, and general absence of behavioural signs of intoxication are consistent with field observations and indicate that this method of dietary exposure may be used to develop predictive models of tissue-specific CTX uptake, metabolism and depuration. Results also imply that slow-growing fish may accumulate higher CTX flesh concentrations than fast-growing fish, which has important implications for global seafood safety.
The fate of radionuclides in the environment is a cause of great concern for modern society, seen especially in 2011 after the Fukushima accident. Among the environmental compartments, seawater covers most of the earth's surface and may be directly or indirectly impacted. The interaction between radionuclides and the marine compartment is therefore essential for better understanding the transfer mechanisms from the hydrosphere to the biosphere. This information allows for the evaluation of the impact on humans via our interaction with the biotope that has been largely undocumented up to now. In this report, we attempt to make a link between the speciation of heavy elements in natural seawater and their uptake by a model marine organism. More specifically, because the interaction of actinides with marine invertebrates has been poorly studied, the accumulation in a representative member of the Mediterranean coralligenous habitat, the sponge Aplysina cavernicola, was investigated and its uptake curve exposed to a radiotracer (241)Am was estimated using a high-purity Ge gamma spectrometer. But in order to go beyond the phenomenological accumulation rate, the speciation of americium(III) in seawater must be assessed. The speciation of (241)Am (and natural europium as its chemically stable surrogate) in seawater was determined using a combination of different techniques: Time-Resolved Laser-Induced Fluorescence (TRLIF), Extended X-ray Absorption Fine Structure (EXAFS) at the LIII edge, Attenuated Total Reflectance Fourier Transform Infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and the resulting data were compared with the speciation modeling. In seawater, the americium(III) complex (as well as the corresponding europium complex, although with conformational differences) was identified as a ternary sodium biscarbonato complex, whose formula can be tentatively written as NaAm(CO3)2·nH2O. It is therefore this chemical form of americium that is accumulated by the sponge A. cavernicola.
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