Abstract
BackgroundThe trophic magnification factor (TMF) is a metric that describes the average trophic magnification of a chemical through a food web. TMFs may be used for the risk assessment of chemicals, although TMFs for single compounds can vary considerably between studies despite thorough guidance available in the literature to eliminate potential sources of error. The practical realization of a TMF investigation is quite complex and often only a few chemicals can be investigated due to low sample masses. This study evaluated whether a pragmatic approach involving the large-scale cryogenic sample preparation practices of the German Environmental Specimen Bank (ESB) is feasible. This approach could provide sufficient sample masses for a reduced set of samples allowing screenings for a broad spectrum of substances and by that enabling a systematic comparison of derived TMFs. Furthermore, it was assessed whether plausible TMFs can be derived with the ‘Food web on ice’ approach via a comparison with literature TMF values.ResultsThis investigation at Lake Templin near Potsdam is the first TMF study for a German freshwater ecosystem and aimed to derive TMFs that are appropriate for regulatory purposes. A set of 15 composite biota samples was obtained and analyzed for an extended set of benchmark chemicals such as persistent organic pollutants, mercury and perfluoroalkyl substances. TMFs were calculated for all substances that were present in > 80% of the biota samples. For example, in the case of polychlorinated biphenyls, TMFs from 1.7 to 2.5 were determined and comparisons to literature TMFs determined in other freshwater ecosystems showed similarities. We showed that 32 out of 35 compounds analyzed had TMFs significantly above 1. In the remaining three cases, the correlations were not statistically significant.ConclusionsThe derived food web samples allow for an on-demand analysis and are ready-to-use for additional investigations. Since substances with non-lipophilic accumulation properties were also included in the list of analyzed substances, we conclude that the ‘Food web on ice’ provides samples which could be used to characterize the trophic magnification potential of substances with unknown bioaccumulation properties in the future which in return could be compared directly to the benchmarking patterns provided here.
Highlights
The trophic magnification factor (TMF) is a metric that describes the average trophic magnification of a chemical through a food web
Trophic magnification factors (TMFs), which describe the average accumulation of a substance through a food web of interest, have been suggested to support the risk assessment of marketed chemicals which are already present in the environment and are subject of regulatory concern [11, 12]
With the here presented project ’Food web on ice’, we propose a cost-efficient way to use archived samples of a single sampling campaign in a way that allows the derivation of TMFs for a range of current and future relevant chemicals
Summary
The trophic magnification factor (TMF) is a metric that describes the average trophic magnification of a chemical through a food web. The use of field data in regulatory bioaccumulation assessment has been discussed [8,9,10] but they are still underused This concerns the systematic investigation of ecosystems for existing chemicals and the quantification of their accumulation in food webs. Trophic magnification factors (TMFs), which describe the average accumulation of a substance through a food web of interest, have been suggested to support the risk assessment of marketed chemicals which are already present in the environment and are subject of regulatory concern [11, 12]. Data on the accumulation of new potentially problematic substances that are less well studied can be compared to the accumulation of these reference chemicals in the same system
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