Revised fish aging techniques improve fish contaminant trend analyses in the face of changing Great Lakes food webs.

ABSTRACT: Incorporation of fish age into the assessment of status and trends for persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic chemicals in the Great Lakes has become an important step for the U.S. EPA's Great Lakes Fish Monitoring and Surveillance Program (GLFMSP). A slowing in the rate of decline for total PCBs in Lake Huron beginning in 2000, led the Program to complete a retrospective analysis to assess how chemical contamination may be influenced by fish age. Analytical results suggest that fish age is an important variable when assessing contaminant trends and that the Program needed to revise its compositing scheme to group fish according to age, rather than by length, prior to homogenization and chemical analysis. An Interlaboratory comparison study of multiple age structures was performed to identi

SUBMITTER: Murphy EW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6178836 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature