ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Evidence that Pacific tuna mercury levels are driven by marine methylmercury production and anthropogenic inputs.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 62 citations in OpenAlex.
- Total mercury exposure through canned tuna in water sold in Quito, Ecuador.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Exploring Drivers of Historic Mercury Trends in Beluga Whales Using an Ecosystem Modeling Approach.ACS environmental Au · 2024Article
- Global mercury concentrations in biota: their use as a basis for a global biomonitoring framework.Ecotoxicology (London, England) · 2024Review
- Seabirds reveal mercury distribution across the North Atlantic.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Article
- The Marginal Ice Zone as a dominant source region of atmospheric mercury during central Arctic summertime.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Review
- The quintessence of metallomics: a harbinger of a different life science based on the periodic table of the bioelements.Metallomics : integrated biometal science · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
20 authors at 9 institutions in 8 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Pacific Ocean tuna is among the most-consumed seafood products but contains relatively high levels of the neurotoxin methylmercury. Limited observations suggest tuna mercury levels vary in space and time, yet the drivers are not well understood. Here, we map mercury concentrations in skipjack tuna across the Pacific Ocean and build generalized additive models to quantify the anthropogenic, ecological, and biogeochemical drivers. Skipjack mercury levels display a fivefold spatial gradient, with maximum concentrations in the northwest near Asia, intermediate values in the east, and the lowest levels in the west, southwest, and central Pacific. Large spatial differences can be explained by the depth of the seawater methylmercury peak near low-oxygen zones, leading to enhanced tuna mercury concentrations in regions where oxygen depletion is shallow. Despite this natural biogeochemical control, the mercury hotspot in tuna caught near Asia is explained by elevated atmospheric mercury concentrations and/or mercury river inputs to the coastal shelf. While we cannot ignore the legacy mercury contribution from other regions to the Pacific Ocean (e.g., North America and Europe), our results suggest that recent anthropogenic mercury release, which is currently largest in Asia, contributes directly to present-day human mercury exposure.
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