Sampling, Isolating and Identifying Microplastics Ingested by Fish and Invertebrates *
By A. Lusher, N. Welden, Paula Sobral, M. Cole. Analysis of Nanoplastics and Microplastics in Food, 2017
889 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Microplastic debris (<5 mm) is a prolific environmental pollutant, found worldwide in marine, freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems. Interactions between biota and microplastics are prevalent, and there is growing evidence that microplastics can incite significant health effects in exposed organisms. To date, the methods used to quantify such interactions have varied greatly between studies. Here, we critically review methods for sampling, isolating and identifying microplastics ingested by environmentally and laboratory exposed fish and invertebrates. We aim to draw attention to the strengths and weaknesses of the suite of published microplastic extraction and enumeration techniques. Firstly, we highlight the risk of microplastic losses and accumulation during biotic sampling and storage, and suggest protocols for mitigating contamination in the field and laboratory. We evaluate a suite of methods for extracting microplastics ingested by biota, including dissection, depuration, digestion and density separation. Lastly, we consider the applicability of visual identification and chemical analyses in categorising microplastics. We discuss the urgent need for the standardisation of protocols to promote consistency in data collection and analysis. Harmonized methods will allow for more accurate assessment of the impacts and risks microplastics pose to biota and increase comparability between studies.
Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dd940f16634a948dee241989783a6b796f6bdab9
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In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
In Pollution
Citations in the corpus
- Contributions of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy in microplastic pollution research: A review (2020, methodology): “Various digestion methods including oxidant digestion (reagent: 30% H2O2/35% H2O2/5% NaCIO), acid digestion (reagent: 65% HNO3/37% HCl), alkaline digestion (reagent: 10M NaOH/10% KOH) and enzymatic digestion (reagent: trypsin/proteinase K) are used for purification (Lusher et al., 2017).”
- Understanding How Microplastics Affect Marine Biota on the Cellular Level Is Important for Assessing Ecosystem Function: A Review (2019, background): “Reduced functionality is correlated to the disappearance of animals (Lusher et al. 2017).”
- Microplastics in freshwater fishes: Occurrence, impacts and future perspectives (2021, background): “…blanks, and ensuring reagents and equipment are filtered and cleaned prior to use are all effective ways to reduce contamination to acceptable levels (e.g. <10% of sample counts) (e.g. Collard et al., 2019; Dehaut et al., 2019; Gong & Xie, 2020; Lusher et al., 2017; Scopetani et al., 2020).”
- Investigating microplastic trophic transfer in marine top predators. (2018, result): “This is important because some species of fish are known to regurgitate stomach contents during capture as a result of handling stress which may result in the loss of microplastics and so bias the results of any analysis (Bromley, 1994; Lusher et al., 2017; Lusher et al., 2018).”
- Microplastic Contamination in Freshwater Environments: A Review, Focusing on Interactions with Sediments and Benthic Organisms (2020, methodology): “Acid digestion is generally applied using HNO3, which is most often used since it shows high degradation of organic matter (>98% weight loss of biological tissue) [162].”