First evidence of microplastic ingestion by fishes from the Amazon River estuary

Abstract

This study investigated occurrence of microplastic particles in digestive tracts of fishes from the Amazon River estuary. A total of 189 fish specimens representing 46 species from 22 families was sampled from bycatch of the shrimp fishery. Microplastic particles removed from fish gastrointestinal tracts were identified using Attenuated Total Reflectance - Fourier Transform Infrared (ATR-FTIR). In total, 228 microplastic particles were removed from gastrointestinal tracts of 26 specimens representing 14 species (30% of those examined). Microplastic particles were categorized as pellets (97.4%), sheets (1.3%), fragments (0.4%) and threads (0.9%), with size ranging from 0.38 to 4.16 mm. There was a positive correlation between fish standard length and number of particles found in gastrointestinal tracts. The main polymers identified by ATR-FTIR were polyamide, rayon and polyethylene. These findings provide the first evidence of microplastic contamination of biota from the Amazon estuary and northern coast of Brazil.

The presence of microplastics in the digestive tract of commercial fishes off Pantai Indah Kapuk coast, Jakarta, Indonesia

“…So that in the same species, there was no correlation between the numbers of ingested microplastics, either total body weight or total body length. Some other previous studies found similar results that there was no correlation between the amount of ingested microplastic and either fish length (Alomar et al 2017;Guven et al 2017;Pazos et al 2017;Vendel et al 2017;Digka et al 2018;Horton et al 2018), sex (Guven et al 2017;Horton et al 2018), total body weight (Peters et al 2016;Guven et al 2017;Pazos et al 2017;Halstead et al 2018;Pegado et al 2018), feeding habit (Guven et al 2017;Pazos et al 2017), or trophic level (Guven et al 2017;Pegado et al 2018). Chen et al (2017) even found that larval body length was significantly reduced by 6% due to nanoplastic ingestion by zebrafish (Danio rerio).…”

“…In contrast, some previous studies showed that the number of ingested microplastics was statistically and positively correlated to fish weight (Horton et al 2018) and fish length (Peters et al 2016;Pegado et al 2018). The larger fishes had more plastics in their digestive tract than smaller fishes (Boerger et al 2010;Compa et al 2018).…”

“…Microplastics are also potentially available to planktivorous organisms because of their small size (Wright et al 2013). Microplastics can be translocated from lower trophic level organisms to higher trophic level organisms through the food web (Teuten et al 2009;Anastasopoulou et al 2013;Pegado et al 2018).…”

Microplastics: Contaminants of Global Concern in the Anthropocene

“…21,23,42,49,51,55,60 No entanto, são poucos os estudos realizados no Brasil. [61][62][63][64][65][66] Colabuno et al 61 O estudo sobre microplásticos no Brasil é ainda recente na literatura científica. Pesquisas sobre a ocorrência, distribuição e análise química dessas partículas em amostras ambientais de sedimento arenoso e água têm ocorrido mais intensamente na região costeira do Nordeste e sudeste do país.…”

Amazonia: the new frontier for plastic pollution

“…This "mountain" of plastic waste, much of it trapped within flooded forests, eventually degrades into microplastics that can be incorporated into the soil and/or carried back into the water, thus posing another threat to Amazonian biota. Recent pilot studies in the lower Xingu River and the Amazon estuary revealed microplastic particles in the digestive tracts of 13 freshwater and 14 marine fish species, 20 of which are commonly consumed by humans (Pegado et al 2018;Andrade et al 2019). Once ingested by a fish, these microplastics may then be transported to muscle or other tissues, where the particles may be retained for the fish's entire lifespan (Karami et al 2017).…”