Assessing urban microplastic pollution in a benthic habitat of Patagonia Argentina

RÍOS, MARÍA F.; HERNÁNDEZ-MORESINO, RODRIGO D.; GALVÁN, DAVID E.

MARINE POLLUTION BULLETIN

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

Año: 2020 vol. 159

0025-326X

Plasticpollution in the oceans has become a global problem, but itsdocumentation is disparate around the world. We assess the abundanceand type of microplastics in three benthic matrices: mussels, smallfishes, and bottom water; in three sites nearby Puerto Madryn city(Patagonia, Argentina). Microplastics were present in the threematrices for all sites sampled. The average amounts of items observedwere 1.6 and 0.3 per total wet weight in fishes and mussels,respectively, and 10.5 per litre in bottom water. Mussels and fishespresented a difference of microplastics size comparing with thesurrounding bottoms waters; fishes also presented colordiscrimination, suggesting the necessity of more than onebioindicator to perform microplastic pollution monitoring. Moreover,small fishes had more MPs in their gastrointestinal tractsthan bigger ones. The present study is the first one about theinteraction between MPs and small aquatic organisms in coastal marineenvironments from Patagonia.p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; direction: ltr; color: #000000; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background: transparent }p.western { so-language: en-US }p.cjk { so-language: zh-CN }p.ctl { so-language: ar-SA }a:link { color: #0000ff; text-decoration: underline }a:visited { color: #800000; so-language: zxx; text-decoration: underline }