Food Web-Specific Biomagnification of Persistent Organic Pollutants
Abstract
Substances that accumulate to hazardous levels in living organisms pose environmental and human-health risks, which governments seek to reduce or eliminate. Regulatory authorities identify bioaccumulative substances as hydrophobic, fat-soluble chemicals having high octanol-water partition coefficients (KOW) (≥100,000). Here we show that poorly metabolizable, moderately hydrophobic substances with a KOW between 100 and 100,000, which do not biomagnify (that is, increase in chemical concentration in organisms with increasing trophic level) in aquatic food webs, can biomagnify to a high degree in food webs containing air-breathing animals (including humans) because of their high octanol-air partition coefficient (KOA) and corresponding low rate of respiratory elimination to air. These low KOW-high KOA chemicals, representing a third of organic chemicals in commercial use, constitute an unidentified class of potentially bioaccumulative substances that require regulatory assessment to prevent possible ecosystem and human-health consequences.
- Publication:
-
Science
- Pub Date:
- July 2007
- DOI:
- 10.1126/science.1138275
- Bibcode:
- 2007Sci...317..236K
- Keywords:
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- ECOLOGY