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Microplastic Sources, Contamination, and Impacts on Aquaculture Organisms
Summary
This book chapter reviews how aquaculture equipment such as nets, ropes, and feed pellets introduces microplastics directly into fish and shellfish farming environments, while ocean currents and runoff add further contamination. Farmed species including mussels, fish, and shrimp have been found contaminated with microplastics across multiple studies. The chapter also notes that research on the health effects of these particles on humans consuming farmed seafood remains limited, representing a significant gap given the global scale of aquaculture.
This chapter summarizes microplastics (MPs) sources in the aquaculture environment, mechanisms of interactions with organisms, contamination, and effects on biota. Mussels sourced from farmed and wild environments and markets from around the world were reported to be polluted with MPs. Studies reported that the other aquaculture organisms were also contaminated with MPs. MPs enter the aquaculture environment from both direct and indirect sources. Direct sources are wearing and tearing aquaculture equipment and are abandoned/lost or otherwise discarded fishing gears (ALDFG). Indirect sources are wind, runoff which delivers MPs into aquaculture systems, pre-contaminated feeds, contaminated bait used in pole and line, and other baited fisheries. Laboratory studies have found two main mechanisms of MPs-biota interactions: adherence and uptake. Exposure of biota to MPs results in adverse physical damages and cellular and molecular level toxic effects that sometimes lead to death. MPs toxicity experiments on humans are still at an infancy level, making it hard to accurately determine the adverse effects on human health.
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