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Whale Baleen To Monitor Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) in Marine Environments
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Researchers found that whale baleen—the keratin filter-feeding plates that grow incrementally over time—can serve as a novel biomonitoring matrix for PFAS contamination, detecting these "forever chemicals" across six species including endangered blue and North Atlantic right whales, and enabling multi-year exposure timelines from a single tissue sample.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) comprise > 10,000 synthetic compounds that are globally distributed and highly persistent but remain challenging to monitor. Here we assess the utility of baleen-an accreting, keratinaceous tissue that baleen whales use for filter-feeding-to track PFAS dynamics in marine food webs. In six species investigated, PFAS were detected in all baleen tested (n = 18 plates, 220 samples, Σ10PFAS range 0.02 - 60.5 ng/g dry weight), higher than other tissue types besides liver. Three of the species in our dataset had not been tested for PFAS-contamination previously and two of those species-blue whale and North Atlantic right whale-are endangered species internationally. Apparent links were observed between PFAS and life-history events by testing successive subsamples along the growth axis of the baleen plates. These results establish baleen as a viable sample matrix for assessing PFAS contamination in marine ecosystems by enabling multiyear time-series analyses through single-tissue sampling with seasonal resolution.
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When a large batch of papers lands in the Atlas, we read through it and send a short write-up of what stood out.