Assessing plastic debris in aquatic food webs: What we know and don't know about uptake and trophic transfer
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Plastic pollution is now recognized as a global environmental issue that can affect the health of biota and ecosystems. Now that a growing number of species and taxa are known to ingest a diverse range of sizes and types of plastics and retain the plastics in their guts, there are increasing questions relating to the movement of plastics through food webs, and how biota may directly and indirectly ingest plastics. Here, we synthesize what is known from the published, peer-reviewed literature about plastic ingestion by animals and identify critical gaps in our knowledge. We systematically reviewed and examined the literature for studies that reported ingested plastics in marine and freshwater biota at a global scale. Our objective was to inform discussions and future studies regarding what we know about plastic ingestion and fate in food webs. We assessed what regions, ecosystems, and food webs have been studied to date and whether potential information may already be available to assess if trophic transfer of plastics may be occurring. We found 160 relevant publications through 2016. Most studies were concentrated in specific regions and in specific ecosystem types, with freshwater studies being the most limited. Moreover, most studies examined one species at a time with only a handful of regions with multiple taxa examined across multiple studies. Twenty-one percent of the regions have no published data on plastic ingestion to date. Although some studies have measured ingestion in multiple species across trophic levels, few have tested the hypothesis that plastics are transferred across trophic levels. Moreover, none have addressed questions related to biomagnification. While our review suggests that numerous papers have recorded the ingestion of plastics by biota across many trophic levels, habitats, and geographic regions, many questions regarding how or whether biota retain, bioaccumulate, biomagnify, and trophically transfer plastics still need to be addressed.
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Organisms of various trophic levels ingest or uptake microplastics, either directly or indirectly.
“Both laboratory experiments and in situ observations have confirmed that organisms of various trophic levels ingest or uptake microplastics, either directly or indirectly (Cole et al., 2013;Provencher et al., 2018;Scherer et al., 2017;Setälä et al., 2014).”
From No Effect of Realistic Concentrations of Polyester Microplastic Fibers on Freshwater Zooplankton Communities (2024) · cites this paper as Provencher et al., 2018
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Presence of plastic particles in waterbirds faeces collected in Spanish lakes
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In situ ingestion of microfibres by meiofauna from sandy beaches
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
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“Bioaccumulation refers to the increase of a pollutant, i.e. microplastics, in an organism over time, or the gradual net uptake from all environmental compartments, including the surrounding environment and the food items [21, 28, 29, 39, 40].”
BackgroundKim, J., Poirier, D. G., Helm, P. A., Bayoumi, M., & Rochman, C. M. (2020) · PLOS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0239128 · Cited by 46 · see citing works
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“Both laboratory experiments and in situ observations have con fi rmed that organisms of various trophic levels ingest or uptake microplastics, either directly or indirectly (Cole et al., 2013; Provencher et al., 2018; Scherer et al., 2017; Setälä et al., 2014).”
Background
- Authors
- Provencher, J. F., Ammendolia, J., Rochman, C. M., & Mallory, M. L.
- Affiliations
- Environment and Climate Change Canada (CA)
- Memorial University of Newfoundland (CA)
- University of Toronto (CA)
- Acadia University (CA)
- Venue
- Environmental Reviews
- Publisher
- Canadian Science Publishing
- Published
- 2019-09
- Volume
- 27
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 304-317
- ISSN
- 1181-8700 (ISSN-L)
- 1208-6053
- OpenAlex
- W2899730238
- Cited by
- 194
- References
- 110
- Citations by year
- 2026: 20 · 2025: 26 · 2024: 20 · 2023: 34 · 2022: 25 · 2021: 34 · 2020: 28 · 2019: 7
- FWCI
- 6.47
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- hdl.handle.net
- Locations
- Environmental Reviews (publishedVersion)
- TSpace (University of Toronto) (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- Association of Canadian Universities for Northern Studies
- Liber Ero Foundation
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Pollution › Microplastics and Plastic Pollution
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis › Environmental Toxicology and Ecotoxicology
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Nature and Landscape Conservation › Turtle Biology and Conservation
- Keywords
- plastic pollution, plastic ingestion, trophic transfer, food webs, biomagnification, bioaccumulation, marine organisms, freshwater organisms, trophic levels
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
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