Abstract
Expansion of aquatic deoxygenation has altered the quality and availability of habitats and worsened body condition for many fish species through past decades. Identifying complementary chemical redox proxies in fish otoliths, in addition to Mn/Ca, would strengthen the ability to identify hypoxia exposure in a diversity of aquatic habitats. I/Ca ratios have been used in marine sediments and bio-mineralized materials for reconstruction of past redox conditions. In order to explore influences from various endogenous and exogenous processes, a large data set of I/Ca ratios from cores of otoliths, including fishes from fresh, estuarine, and coastal waters across 30 species within 10 taxonomic orders, were reported with other chemical proxies (Mn/Ca and Sr/Ca) using LA-ICP-MS. Our results suggest no single abiotic factor, including redox condition and salinity derived from Mn/Ca and Sr/Ca, predicts I/Ca values, while they may be correlated for specific fish species. Iodine may be related to organic matter in the cores of otoliths for some species. Maternal transfer, habitat change, dietary source, phylogeny, and ecology may also influence I/Ca ratios. Based on these exploratory results, we suggest a range of future research directions to further evaluate the factors controlling biomineralization of otolith iodine and its utility as a redox proxy.
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The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available in supplementary files.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge funding support from the US National Science Foundation (OCE-1923965 to KL, OCE- 1633020 to BW, OCE- 1433719 to ZL). We would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments as well as Dr. Margaret Docker for the editorial handling.
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Southern Flounder were collected under approved IACUC protocol AUP-2010-00066 at the University of Texas at Austin. Atlantic Croaker carcasses were obtained from standard fisheries independent monitoring surveys by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration SEAMAP program, and thus IACUC approval was not required. Most samples from Hudson River and East Coast of US were collected under IACUC protocol 102313, 170501, 170701, and 190601. For fish samples from Baltic Basin, all of the otoliths were received after being extracted from fish upon capture, and thus no field-based experiments have been conducted by any of the authors.
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He, R., Limburg, K.E., Walther, B.D. et al. Iodine content of fish otoliths in species found in diverse habitats. Environ Biol Fish 105, 351–367 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10641-022-01228-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10641-022-01228-6