Strontium in fin whale baleen: A potential tracer of mysticete movements across the oceans?
| Autor: | Morgana Vighi, Alex Aguilar, Gísli A. Víkingsson, Asunción Borrell, Th. Gunnlaugsson |
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| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Předmět: |
Water mass
Environmental Engineering 010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences Zoology chemistry.chemical_element 010501 environmental sciences 01 natural sciences Balenes TRACER biology.animal Animals Environmental Chemistry Waste Management and Disposal 0105 earth and related environmental sciences Estronci Strontium Fin Whale biology Chemistry Whale Whales Pollution Fin Whales Baleen Habitat Animal Migration Water Pollutants Chemical Environmental Monitoring |
| Zdroj: | Dipòsit Digital de la UB Universidad de Barcelona |
| ISSN: | 0048-9697 |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.09.103 |
| Popis: | Strontium is a metal broadly distributed in oceanic waters, where its concentrations follow gradients mainly driven by oceanographic and biological factors. Studies on terrestrial vertebrates show that Sr can accumulate in mammalian hair in amounts mainly related to the external environment, a property that has been scarcely investigated in aquatic mammals. Cetaceans are marine mammals whose skin is generally hairless, but the species belonging to the mysticete group feed through a filtering apparatus made of keratinous baleen plates that, like hair, grow continuously. During their annual latitudinal migrations, mysticetes cross water masses with variable chemo-physical characteristics that may be reflected in these tissues. In the present study, baleen plates were sampled from 10 fin whales obtained from NW Spain (N = 5) and SW Iceland (N = 5) to investigate Sr concentrations along the plates growth axis. Samples were taken longitudinally at regular 1 cm-intervals on each plate. Sr concentrations, determined through mass spectrometry, ranged from 5 to 40 mg kg−1 and increased from proximal to distal positions along plates. These results suggest a progressive adsorption of Sr on the plate surface, a process that also occurs in mammalian hair. Increasing trends were similar in the two regions but overall concentrations were significantly higher in NW Spain, reflecting different Sr baseline concentrations in the two areas and indicating isolation between the two whale populations. Some oscillations in Sr longitudinal trends were also detected, likely indicating that whales migrate across water masses with different Sr baselines. These results suggest that Sr concentrations in keratinous tissues of marine mammals can be used as ecological tracers of their migrations and habitat use. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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