Abstract
Assessment of Heavy Metal Concentration in Tissues of Three Owl Species From Visakhapatnam, India
Highlights
Over the past few years, heavy metals have been accumulating in our environment due to the various anthropogenic point and non-point sources
A total of 27 Owls were collected from Simhachalam, Kambalakonda and Old post Office (Port Area) which are represented in Table 1 along with their current conservation status according to IUCN (2019)
Heavy metal concentrations of Pb, Zn and Cr were determined and the results have been expressed in dry weight (Adrian & Steven 1979, Biswas et al 2019)
Summary
Over the past few years, heavy metals have been accumulating in our environment due to the various anthropogenic point and non-point sources. Due to the biomagnification properties of certain elements like organic forms of arsenic and mercury, when they get biomagnified over the foodchain, they jeopardize the health of living forms (De Luca et al 2001, Grúz et al 2018) It was reported by Denneman & Douben (1993) that birds were first used for monitoring the environmental conditions in the early 1960s because birds are more susceptible and tend to react to environmental changes. Tertiary consumers are good indicators in determining the extent of environmental contamination in the ecosystem across the food web (Sanchari et al 2016, Biswas et al 2019) It stated that birds have been used as bioindicators for monitoring environmental pollutants (Gragnaniello et al 2001, Muralidharan et al 2004) heavy metals (Mochizuki et al 2002) since they are easy to access, broadly distributed in ecosystems, sensitive to toxins and on higher trophic level of food chains. Different birds including Eagle Owls have been frequently used as biomonitors to monitor heavy metal burden in the environment (Nighat et al 2013, Guitart et al 2010, Grúz et al 2018)
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