New Publication for 2021

Purple sea urchin (Paracentrotus lividus) profile (Image Credit: Frederic Durcame)

The RESPONSE team is ringing in the new year with this exciting new publication from our colleagues, Jerome Cachot, Francesca Garaventa, Ricardo Beiras and Chiara Gambardella!

This paper entitled Chemicals Sorbed to Environmental Microplastics are Toxic to Early Life Stages of Aquatic Organisms was developed under both JPI Oceans funded projects EPHEMARE and REPSONSE, and was lead by University of Bordeaux (Jerome Cachot), with contributions from CNR-IAS (Francesca Garaventa and Chiara Gambardella) and University of Vigo (Ricardo Beiras).The purpose of this study was first to characterize microplastics stranded on two island beaches (Basse-Terre and Marie-Galante) in the Guadeloupe archipelago in terms of polymer composition and sorbed chemicals. The toxicity of environmental microplastics leachates was then investigated for the early life stages of three aquatic organisms using leachates. The organisms used in this study included; sea urchin (Paracentrotus lividus), jellyfish (Aurelia sp.) and zebrafish (Danio rerio), using leachates.

The results of this study show that microplastics can contain high levels of potentially bioavailable toxic substances, that may represent a significant ecotoxicological risk.

You can access the full article here and in our publications section.