Microplastics in decapod crustaceans sourced from Australian seafood markets

Investigating microplastic contamination and biomagnification in a remote area of South Australia

“…Likewise, these trends match global microplastic contamination, where frequency of occurrence and plastic load is generally higher in more populated and urban regions than in isolated areas (Jang et al 2014;Gola et al 2021). In addition to human activity, other factors such as currents, winds and hydrodynamics will also contribute to the spatial variations across regional areas in South Australia (Reisser et al 2013;Klein et al 2022;Ogunola et al 2022;Leterme et al 2023). Nonetheless, accurate comparison of microplastic loads across studies is still difficult because of a wide variety of sampling, laboratory, and quality-control methods (Provencher et al 2020a;Wootton et al 2021b).…”

“…When comparing the contamination of biota from Black Point to other regions, the frequency of occurrence was expectedly low and matched values observed both in Australia and worldwide, namely in regions with lower human presence. For example, 35.5% of fish (Wootton et al 2021a) and 48% of crustaceans (Ogunola et al 2022) across Australian marine waters had microplastic present; however, up to 92% of mussels (Klein et al 2022) and 100% of oysters (Jahan et al 2019) sampled from coastal urban areas contained microplastic. Likewise, these trends match global microplastic contamination, where frequency of occurrence and plastic load is generally higher in more populated and urban regions than in isolated areas (Jang et al 2014;Gola et al 2021).…”

“…The resultant solution was filtered through stainless steel sieves of 1 mm and 38 μm. Microplastics retained on each of the sieves were examined under the dissecting stereo-microscope (Ogunola et al 2022). Overall, for all sample types, microplastics in the filters or sieves were visually examined, manually scanning the whole sample, with potential microplastics identified, counted and information on shape (fibre, film or fragment) and colour was recorded, following methods and criteria in Hidalgo-Ruz et al (2012).…”

“…The FTIR spectrum of each potential microplastic piece was recorded using an average of 64 scans in the range of 3900-650 cm −1 with the atmospheric water CO 2 region between 2500 and 1900 cm −1 excluded when compared with the BRUKER Hyperion ATR spectral library for polymers. A threshold score of at least 70% (hit quality) was used to ensure the reliability of the identification of microplastics (Wootton et al 2022;Zhang et al 2022).…”

“…Microplastic ingestion has been reported globally, including in wild bivalve molluscs collected along South Australia's coastline (Klein et al 2022), and in South Australian seafood species sold for human consumption (Wootton et al 2021a;Ogunola et al 2022). However, there is still limited research worldwide characterising multiple marine matrices (e.g.…”