Baseline
Long-term monitoring of Nucella lapillus imposex in Ria de Aveiro (Portugal): When will a full recovery happen?☆

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2021.112411Get rights and content

Highlights

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    N. lapillus imposex levels are low yet increased at some locations between 2013 and 2019.

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    Research in Ria de Aveiro prophesy a very long period for a full recovery from OT-AFS

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    The failure to eradicate imposex point to the urgency to restrict OT-AFS worldwide

Abstract

Nucella lapillus imposex has been monitored in Ria de Aveiro (Portugal) in order to understand the evolution of organotin (OT) pollution after the EU ban on OT-based antifouling systems (OT-AFS). A rapid decrease of imposex occurred, but a countercurrent tendency upsurged recently (2018–2019) with a slight increase of imposex at some sites, instead of a continuous decline towards a complete recovery. In 2018 the vas deferens sequence index ranged between 0.6 and 1.0 across stations and the percentage of females with imposex varied from 63 to 100%. In 2019 these parameters varied between 0.4 and 1.0 and 37–100%, while the concentration of butyltins (TBT, DBT, MBT) in the dogwhelk tissues were < 1 ng Sn g-1 dw. Although N. lapillus imposex levels are low they are indicative of OT pollution. The full recovery of N. lapillus imposex in the future is uncertain and a cause for concern.

Section snippets

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Diana Gomes: field sampling, biological analysis, methodology, writing. Susana Galante-Oliveira: conceptualization, methodology, reviewing, editing, fund acquisition. Isabel Benta-Oliveira: methodology. Ítalo Castro: reviewing. Fiamma Abreu: chemical analysis, writing and reviewing. Gilberto Fillmann: chemical analysis, supervision and reviewing. Carlos Barroso: conceptualization, field sampling, methodology, validation, writing, reviewing supervision, fund acquisition.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to FCT/MCTES –Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P./Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Ensino Superior– for the financial support to CESAM (UIDP/50017/2020+UIDB/50017/2020), through national funds. S.G.-O. was supported by national funds through FCT, in the scope of the framework contract foreseen in the numbers 4, 5 and 6 of the article 23, of the Decree-Law 57/2016, of August 29, changed by Law 57/2017, of July 19. F.E.L. Abreu was PhD fellow of CAPES, while I.B. Castro

References (23)

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    This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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