Elsevier

Science of The Total Environment

Volumes 461–462, 1 September 2013, Pages 441-452
Science of The Total Environment

The presence of EU priority substances mercury, hexachlorobenzene, hexachlorobutadiene and PBDEs in wild fish from four English rivers

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2013.05.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A fish tissue archive was set up to monitor persistent pollutants in English rivers.

  • The chemicals with EU EQS for biota (Hg, HCB, and HCBD) were measured in some fish.

  • Hg concentration was size dependant and exceeded EQS of 20 μg/kg in 79% of samples.

  • HCB and HCBD were always below their standards of 10 and 55 μg/kg.

  • A proposed PBDE EQS of 0.0085 μg/kg was exceeded more than 200 times in every fish.

Abstract

Since 2007 about 200 to 300 fish per year – generally roach (Rutilus rutilus) also a few bleak (Alburnus alburnus) and eels (Anguilla anguilla) – have been collected from a number of English river sites and stored at − 80 °C to build up a Fish Tissue Archive as a resource for the monitoring of pollutants. Some of the fish from the Fish Tissue Archive from the years 2007–2011 were analyzed for substances in current and proposed European legislation regarding environmental quality standards (EQS) in biota. It was found that mercury exceeded the EU EQS of 20 μg/kg in 79% of samples with an average and median of 31 and 29 μg/kg. The legacy fungicide hexachlorobenzene (HCB) was below the EQS of 10 μg/kg in all fish analyzed, with a maximum of 6 μg/kg in some eels. The legacy solvent hexachlorobutadiene (HCBD) was below the EQS of 55 μg/kg, being < 0.2 μg/kg in all samples where it was measured. The sums of six polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) were several orders of magnitude higher than the new proposed 0.0085 μg/kg biota EQS. This study showed that the regular collection and analysis of whole body homogenate samples of relatively small native pelagic fish is suitable for the monitoring of contaminants capable of bioaccumulation. With regard to current or proposed EQS for EU countries, mercury and potentially PBDE in fish are of some concern in these English rivers.

Section snippets

Legislation

The Priority Substances Directive of the EU (Directive, 2008/105/EC), which entered into force in January 2009, has the objective of protecting wildlife and humans from harmful effects of chemicals identified as priority substances in surface waters and to monitor trends of these chemicals. It aims to set environmental quality standards (EQS) for a number of chemical pollutants below which no harmful effects are expected to wildlife, or humans. There is an option for member states to set biota,

Fish sampling

Fish were caught at several sites along the Rivers Thames, Kennet, Nene and Glen (Table 2). Using data from the National River Flow Archive (NRFA), Landcover map 2000, and standard-period average annual rainfall (SAAR) for 1961–90 (summarized in the IRN/RACQUEL program developed by CEH: http://wlwater.ceh.ac.uk/racquel/ and in Marsh and Hannaford (2008)) the catchments can be characterized as follows: the Thames in southern UK has a catchment area of 9948 km2, a length of 255 km to the tidal

Results

For HCB, none of the samples analyzed exceeded the EQS of 10 μg/kg (Table 2, Fig. 2). There were species differences with the eels tending to have higher concentrations overall than bleak and roach and higher concentrations than bleak from the same site, although with a 14% probability of arising by chance alone this difference was not significant at the 5% level. This larger burden in the eels may be due to the greater age, or lipid content of these fish and indeed the differences between

Discusssion

The whole body (minus liver and gall bladder in a few 2007 samples) HCB concentration in this study ranged from undetectable to about 6 μg/kg with the higher values mainly found in the estuary eels, but the differences between species or site were mostly not statistically significant (see Fig. 2). There was no evidence for an increase of HCB concentration with fish size. In fact, the largest roach in this study were caught in the relatively rural River Glen and those had the lowest contamination

Conclusions

This exercise indicates that monitoring of rivers for hydrophobic, or bioaccumulative contaminants, such as those found in current and proposed EU Directives, using wild pelagic fish is both feasible and practical. Regarding the original hypotheses: That none of the chemicals with biota EQS proposed by the EU would be exceeded in any fish caught in English rivers has been falsified for Hg and PBDEs. Whether concentrations would differ appreciably between species, has not been conclusively

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Andy Beal, Adam Hilliard, Dan Horsley, Danielle Ashton and their teams in the Environment Agency of England and Wales for the sampling of the fish and providing water quality monitoring data, and Chakra Chaemfa, Athanasios Katsoyiannis, Aşkın Birgül, Sarah Beith, and Hayley Guyatt for help with analysis and interpretation and the anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions to improve the manuscript. The authors wish to thank NERC for its science budget support of CEH

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