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