Discovery of Fluorotelomer Sulfones in the Blubber of Greenland Killer Whales (Orcinus Orca)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most known per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) bioaccumulate by binding to proteins or partitioning to phospholipids, leading to their prevalence in liver and blood. As a result, efforts to improve PFAS exposure estimates by identifying novel bioaccumulative substances, have focused on these tissues. However, the recent discovery of high concentrations of unidentified extractable organofluorine (EOF) in the blubber of a killer whale (Orcinus orca) from Greenland suggests that some fluorinated substances bioaccumulate preferentially in storage lipids. The present work builds on this initial finding by characterizing EOF in an additional 3 killer whales (2 from Greenland, 1 from Sweden), and then subjecting extracts from all 4 whales to analysis via gas chromatography-atmospheric pressure chemical ionization-ion mobility mass spectrometry. Using collision cross sections, we prioritized features suspected to be highly fluorinated, and then selected 5 for manual annotation. Custom synthesised standards confirmed 10:2 and 12:2 fluorotelomer methylsulfone, 10:2 and 12:2 fluorotelomer chloromethylsulfone, and 6:2 bisfluorotelomer sulfone in all blubber samples from Greenland at concentrations ranging from <0.4-72.5 ng/g, explaining 34-75% of blubber EOF. None of these substances were observable in liver, suggesting preferential accumulation in storage lipids. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of fluorotelomer sulfones in wildlife and the first observation of lipophilic, highly fluorinated PFAS.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".