Influence of mussel biological variability on pollution biomarkers

Effect of nutritive status on Mytilus galloprovincialis pollution biomarkers: Implications for large-scale monitoring programs

“…In this study, we observed that NS-1 mussels showed the highest antioxidant responses (SOD, CAT, GPx and GST), that means an inverse relationship between the antioxidant responses and mussel nutritive status, as it was previously suggested in field studies by our group (Bellas et al, 2014;González-Fernández et al, 2015). Other studies described similar results in limpets (Ansaldo et al, 2007) and in fishes (Martínez-Alvarez et al, 2005;Morales et al, 2004;Pascual et al, 2003).…”

“…In these studies, low or even negative values of SFG were related to PAHs accumulation in mussels. On the contrary, we have never found any significant correlation between SFG and PAHs concentration in mussel tissues within the Spanish annual pollution monitoring program (Albentosa et al, 2012a;Bellas et al, 2014;Fernández-González et al, 2015). Similar results were described by Thomas et al (1999) or Wang et al (2005), whom did not observe any significant relationship between SFG and PAHs levels.…”

“…Our experimental results showed a clear inverse relationship between CR (measured under the same food concentration) and mussel nutritive status as it was previously described in our field studies (Albentosa et al, 2012a;Bellas et al, 2014;González-Fernández et al, 2015). According to Filgueira et al (2008), the effect of condition on the CR is evident when CRs are standardized to weight, which is the most usual standardization.…”

“…In the present study, the same relationship was observed: r = −0.61, R 2 = 37.4%, p < 0.001. Here, we induced mussels to obtain a wide range of CI manipulating food conditions but the range of CI obtained: 5.2 (±0.6) to 8.9 (±1.9) was not as high as that observed in our annual monitoring studies where mussel CI ranged from 8.7 (±1.3) to 14.1 (±1.3) in 2012 (González-Fernández et al, 2015) or 6.8 and 7.8 to 13.5 and 18.2 in 2007, respectively (Albentosa et al, 2012a. These strong differences in mussel condition were not only observed between sites, but also between years for the same site, as was evidenced in Albentosa et al (2012a), hindering the interpretation of physiological biomarker responses in large-scale-monitoring programs.…”

“…Correspondingly, several authors have described the seasonal pattern of some biomarker responses due to changes in temperature (Viarengo et al, 1998), food availability (Martínez-Alvarez et al, 2005;Nahrgang et al, 2013;Pascual et al, 2003), reproductive cycle (Sheehan and Power, 1999;Widdows, 1978), shore location (Schmidt et al, 2012;Vidal-Liñán and Bellas, 2013), or salinity (Prevodnik et al, 2007). Previous studies published by our group in large-scale programs (Albentosa et al, 2012a;Bellas et al, 2014;González-Fernández et al, 2015) highlight the influence of nutritional condition of mussels on antioxidant and physiological biomarker responses. In these studies, a wide geographical variability was observed in mussel nutritive status, which was linked to differences in food availability between the areas where the mussels were sampled.…”