CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Increases in human population lead to an increase in urban wastes, which could affectwildlife in several ways. Urban pollutants can affect erythrocytes of birds generatingmorphological membrane and nuclear anomalies. The Kelp Gull (Larus dominicanus)is an opportunistic species, which take advantage of urban environments, thus beinghighly exposed to environmental pollution. In northeastern Patagonia, the dynamic ofthe waste management was transformed in the last decade and consequently, gullschanged their movements in response to changes in waste management systems. Thefood available to the seagulls went from being a mixture of urban/fishing discardsuntil 2015, when this landfill closures, to being domestic urban offerings. In order ofevaluating genotoxicity and changes in pollutants exposition due to these changes, weanalyzed the frequencies of erythrocytes nuclear abnormalities and micronuclei(ENAs and MN respectively) in 58 blood smears from adults extracted during the non-breeding season in two periods in landfills with different waste compositions: a mixedlandfill (ML) in 2013 before closure (n = 24) versus an urban landfill (UL) (n = 34) in2021. We found that Kelp Gull showed high values of abnormalities with an average of151.5 /10,000 RBC in comparison with other seabird species. The bud and notchedtypes of ENAs were the most prevalent abnormalities in both sites. We did not findsignificate differences in the overall abnormality frequency between sites, howeverwe found significant higher frequencies in displaced and tailed types of ENAs in ML.We also found poikilocytosis, as seen previously in other animals exposedexperimentally to pollutants such as metals and crude oil. Cellular abnormalitiesfound in the Kelp Gull suggest an exposition of individuals to pollutants in foragingareas. The hemispheric distribution and the synanthropic characteristics of thespecies denote its importance as a suitable global monitor of genotoxicity.

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