Effects of Polyester Fibers and Car Tire Particles on Freshwater Invertebrates

Abstract

Microplastic ingestion has been shown for various organisms, but knowledge of the potential adverse effects on freshwater invertebrates remains limited. We assessed the ingestion capacity and the associated effects of polyester fibers (26-5761 µm) and car tire particles (25-75 µm) on freshwater invertebrates under acute and chronic exposure conditions. A range of microplastic concentrations was tested on Daphnia magna, Hyalella azteca, Asellus aquaticus, and Lumbriculus variegatus using water only (up to 0.15 g/L) or spiked sediment (up to 2 g/kg dry wt), depending on the habitat of the species. Daphnia magna did not ingest any fibers, but low levels of fibers were ingested by all tested benthic invertebrate species. Car tire particle ingestion rose with increasing exposure concentration for all tested invertebrates and was highest in D. magna and L. variegatus. In most cases, no statistically significant effects on mobility, survival, or reproductive output were observed after acute and chronic exposure at the tested concentrations. However, fibers affected the reproduction and survival of D. magna (no-observed-effect concentration [NOEC]: 0.15 mg/L) due to entanglement and limited mobility under chronic conditions. Car tire particles affected the reproduction (NOEC: 1.5 mg/L) and survival (NOEC: 0.15 mg/L) of D. magna after chronic exposure at concentrations in the same order of magnitude as modeled river water concentrations, suggesting that refined exposure and effect studies should be performed with these microplastics. Our results confirm that microplastic ingestion by freshwater invertebrates depends on particle shape and size and that ingestion quantity depends on the exposure pathway and the feeding strategy of the test organism.

No Effect of Realistic Concentrations of Polyester Microplastic Fibers on Freshwater Zooplankton Communities

“…The null effect of microplastics observed in our study not only was consistent with other community‐level studies but also parallels results from single‐species laboratory studies that used low‐ or environmentally relevant exposure concentrations (Schell et al, 2022; Wang et al, 2019). It is possible that the concentrations currently documented in many freshwater environments do not elicit negative effects for zooplankton organisms.…”

Resilient Amphipods: Gammarid Predatory Behaviour is Unaffected by Microplastic Exposure and Deoxygenation

“…The lack of effect of the more environmentally-relevant (200 mp/L) concentration was expected in line with other studies (Cunningham et al, 2021;Foley et al, 2018;Schell et al, 2022;Stanković et al, 2022). Microplastics research has historically been biased towards reporting positive results over negative, and using excessively high concentrations that do not reflect environmental levels (Cunningham and Sigwart, 2019).…”

Biowaste Compost Amendment Is a Source of Microplastic Pollution in Agricultural Soils

“…Each field was divided into four segments. In each segment, 5 m from the edge a 3 × 3 m 2 size square plot was marked, and from within the plot, five samples (each 1 kg) were obtained at a depth of 10-30 cm randomly using a spade (Schell et al, 2022) A composite sample was created by combining the collected samples. Similar to the fourth sample, the fifth was also taken from the middle of the field.…”

“…The particle size of the microplastics is 1-5000 µm (Frias et al, 2019) and are considered as emerging pollutants that have a severe impact on the ecosystem (Sharma et al, 2017;Townsend et al, 2019;Prata et al, 2020). Plastics are introduced into soils through sewage sludge (Corradini et al, 2019;Schell et al, 2022), irrigation, soil runoff (Pérez-Reverón et al, 2022;Henry et al, 2019), and plastic film mulching (Kumar and Sheela, 2022;Khalid et al, 2023). Another source of soil microplastics (Blasing and Amelung 2018;Scopetani et al, 2022;Zhang et al, 2022) is the addition of compost to fields.…”