Perfluoroalkyl Contaminants in a Food Web from Lake Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) is a persistent and bioaccumulative perfluorinated acid detectable in humans and wildlife worldwide that has alerted scientists to examine the environmental fate of other fluorinated organic contaminants. Recently a homologous series of perfluoroalkyl carboxylates (PFCAs) was detected in the Arctic, yet little is known about their sources, breadth of contamination, or environmental distribution. In this study we analyzed for PFOS, the homologous series of PFCAs ranging from 8 to 15 carbons in chain length, and the PFOS-precursor heptadecafluorooctane sulfonamide (FOSA) in various organisms from a food web of Lake Ontario. The sampled organisms included a top predator fish, lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush), three forage fish species including rainbow smelt (Osmerus mordax), slimy sculpin (Cottus cognatus), and alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus), and two invertebrates Diporeia (Diporeia hoyi) and Mysis (Mysis relicta). A striking finding was that the highest mean concentration for each fluorinated contaminantwas detected in the benthic macroinvertebrate Diporeia, which occupies the lowest trophic level of all organisms analyzed. Perfluorinated acid concentrations in Diporeia were often 10-fold higher than in Mysis, a predominantly pelagic feeder, suggesting that a major source of perfluoroalkyl contaminants to this food web was the sediment, not the water. PFOS was the dominant acid in all samples, but long-chain PFCAs, ranging in length from 8 to 15 carbons, were also detected in most samples between <0.5 and 90 ng/ g. Among Mysis and the more pelagic fish species (e.g. excluding Diporeia and sculpin) there was evidence for biomagnification, but the influence of foraging on highly contaminated Diporeia and sculpin by these fish may have overestimated trophic magnification factors (TMFs), which ranged from 0.51 for FOSA to 5.88 for PFOS. By accounting for the known diet composition of lake trout, it was shown that bioaccumulation was indeed occurring at the top of the food web for all perfluoroalkyl compounds except PFOA. Future monitoring at other locations in Lake Ontario, and in other aquatic environments, is necessary to determine if these food web dynamics are widespread. Archived lake trout samples collected between 1980 and 2001 showed that mean whole body PFOS concentrations increased from 43 to 180 ng/g over this period, but not linearly, and may have been indirectly influenced by the invasion and proliferation of zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha) through effects on the population and ecology of forage fishes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".