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Aquatic Ecosystem Toxicity and Food Chain
Summary
This review examines how toxic substances including heavy metals, nutrients causing algal blooms, and microplastics accumulate in aquatic food chains. Researchers describe how pollutants absorbed by bottom-dwelling organisms can concentrate as they move up through the food web to fish and eventually to humans. The study also discusses emerging remediation approaches using plants and animals to help reduce toxicity in contaminated aquatic ecosystems.
A major proportion of most dangerous toxins settle to the seafloor and are subsequently absorbed by organisms that inhabit the bottom sediments within a variety of aquatic ecosystems. Within these ecosystems, the various biotic components such as fishes, plants, herps and mammals, as well as a wide variety of microorganisms, depend on their surrounding water for survival. It is essential for us to understand the distribution of toxic metals in aquatic ecosystems, so that we can assess their impacts on the environment, as well as the associated health risks that it poses for humans and other organisms that inhabit them. Toxic metals, eutrophication, microplastics, etc., are some of the most important pollutants causing toxicity to aquatic ecosystems. Phytoremediation and zooremediation are two emerging ways in which some of the toxicity can be mitigated and have been discussed in this chapter.