TY - JOUR T1 - Trophic transfer of microplastics enhances tissue accumulation of chemical additives in fish JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2021.03.09.434685 SP - 2021.03.09.434685 AU - Takaaki Hasegawa AU - Kaoruko Mizukawa AU - Yeo Bee Geok AU - Tomonori Sekioka AU - Hideshige Takada AU - Masahiro Nakaoka Y1 - 2021/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/03/10/2021.03.09.434685.abstract N2 - A variety of chemical additives are incorporated into plastics during their production process to give desirable properties. Although studies have suggested that microplastic ingestion can lead to accumulation of these chemicals in marine organisms, none provided the direct evidence in fish species. Here, we demonstrated the tissue accumulation of chemical additives in fish following microplastic ingestion. We exposed fish (Myoxocephalus brandti) to polyethylene microplastics compounded with brominated flame retardants (BFRs; BDE209, DBDPE) and ultraviolet stabilizers (UVs; UV-234, UV-327, BP-12) suspended in the water column, or to mysids (Neomysis spp.) pre-exposed to the same microplastics. Our results showed a maximum of 345-fold higher concentrations of additives in fish exposed to microplastics than the ambient sample. Also, fish fed plastic-exposed mysids accumulated significantly greater concentrations of BFRs in muscle than fish exposed to microplastics suspended in the water column (p < 0.001). This indicates that trophic transfer of microplastics has greater contribution to tissue accumulation of BFRs in fish than the waterborne ingestion. In contrast, no significant difference in the accumulation of UVs was found between the treatments, except for UV-327 in liver. These results suggests that the relative contribution between direct ingestion of microplastics from the water column and indirect ingestion via trophic transfer on tissue accumulation of additives in fish varies among compounds. Compounds with high molecular weight and high hydrophobicity like BDE209 and DBDPE were considered difficult to leach out from plastics, however, our study showed that trophic transfer of microplastics can facilitate the accumulation of such compounds from plastics to fish.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. ER -