Mercury and methyl mercury concentrations in fish

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Moderator:Olli (see all)
Citation of this page: Jouni T. Tuomisto, Patrycja Gradowska: Mercury and methyl mercury concentrations in fish. Opasnet 2009. [1]. Accessed 27 Dec 2024.
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Scope

What are the current mercury and methyl mercury concentrations in fish R↻ Concentrations of sea and freshwater fish species are studied separately.

Definition

Data

The mercury data includes total mercury concentrations of fish species. The most commonly consumed fish species are described: Farmed salmon, wild salmon, herring, white fish, sprat, perch, flounder, pike-perch, bream, pike, vendace and burbot. Concentration data for imported fish in Finland is not available in many cases. D↷

Data 1

⇤--1: . Because there are no reliable sources mentioned, this data should not be used. --Jouni 14:29, 16 September 2009 (EEST) (type: truth; paradigms: science: attack)

• There are no separate data for farmed and for wild salmon. Therefore they are assumed to be the same.
• There are no data for vendace(sea), so assumption is that the parameters are the same as vendace(inland)
• There are no data for bream(sea), so assumption is that the parameters are the same as bream(inland)
• There are no data for wild salmon(inland), so assumption is that the parameters are the same as wildsalmon(sea)

First, the mercury data was used to form lognormal distributions for each species with parameters median and geometric standard deviation. Secondly, the proportion of methyl mercury from total mercury was taken into account. Methyl mercury proportion is assumed to follow triangular distribution (author judgement) with parameters (min=0.81, mode=0.93,max=0.98). D↷

Fish species	Methylmercury concentration
Farmed salmon (sea+inland)	0.06346
Wild salmon	0.06347
Herring(sea)	0.02719
White fish(sea)	0.02719
Sprat(sea)	0.01813
Perch(sea)	0.3082
Flounder(sea)	0.04533
Pike-perch(sea)	0.09972
Bream(sea)	0.05439
Pike(sea)	0.3626
Vendace(sea)	0.0725
Burbot(sea)	0.2358
Wild salmon(inland)	0.06347
White fish(inland)	0.07253
Perch(inland)	0.1269
Pike-perch(inland)	0.272
Bream(inland)	0.0544
Pike(inland)	0.3445
Vendace(inland)	0.07253
Burbot(inland)	0.1995

Analytica code can be found from a previous version

Data 2

Probability distributions of the concentration of methyl mercury (MeHg) in various fish species were extracted from where the data on total mercury (Hg) concentration in fish muscle samples of 16 (inland and sea) species was collected. These distributions were obtained in a two step procedure. First, three theoretical distributions were selected to fit the Hg concnetration data, i.e. Weibull, Lognormal and Gamma. Unfortunately, the number of data points for many species listed was too small to give reliable fit results. Therefore, the best fitting distribution was chosen based on the statistical data analysis and goodness-of-fit evaluation performed on a largest set of data points (BS Herring, 35 samples) and then fitted to data of the rest of fish species. The distribution that provides the best fit to the Hg concentration data is Weibull. Finally, information about the proportion of methyl mercury in total Hg concentration (see above: triangular distribution with min=0.81, mode=0.93, max=0.98) was used to determine the probability distribution of MeHg concnetration in fish species chosen.

Moreover, there is no Hg concentration data for Vendace(sea). Therefore the parameters of Weibull distribution here are assumed to be the same as for Vendace(inland). Similarly, the parameters of Weibull distribution for Hg concnetration in Whitefish(sea) are assumed to be the same as for Whitefish(inland).

Fish species	Mean MeHg concentration
Baltic Herring	0.0259
Vendace(inland)	0.0758
Vendace(sea)	0.0758
Whitefish(inland)	0.0731
Whitefish(sea)	0.0731
Pike(inland)	0.3439
Pike(sea)	0.3629
Perch(inland)	0.1256
Perch(sea)	0.339
Atlantic Salmon	0.0611
Pike-perch(inland)	0.2702
Pike-perch(sea)	0.1001

Dependencies

• None reported.

Unit

mg/kg in fresh weight

Result

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