Occurrence and profiles of PCBs and PBDEs in harbour seals and harbour porpoises from the southern North Sea

• Main Authors: Weijs, L., Dirtu, A.C., Das, K., Gheorghe, A., Reijnders, P., Neels, H., Blust, R., Covaci, A.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2008
• Subjects: Phoca vitulina
• Online Access: https://www.vliz.be/imisdocs/publications/132639.pdf

Harbour porpoises ( Phocoena phocoen ) and harbour seals ( Phoca vitulina ), two representative top coastal pollution. Concentrations of sum PCBs were 1-2 orders of magnitude higher than concentrations of sum PBDEs (with median values of 23.1 μg.g - lw (lipid weight) and 12.4 μ.g -1 lw for sum PCBs and 0.33 μ.g - lw and 0.76 μ.g -1 lw for sum PBDEs in harbour seals and harbour porpoises respectively) and were highly dependent of age group and gender. For both species, the highest PCB concentrations were observed in adult males as the result of accumulation for years and years, while the highest PBDE concentrations were measured in juveniles probably due to better developed metabolic capacities for these congeners with age in adults. Results for PCBs were higher than observations in harbour seals and porpoises from other areas, while results for PBDEs were comparable indicating that the North Sea is a highly contaminated area. Relative PCB and PBDE profiles were constructed to compare metabolic capacities between harbour seals and porpoises. A higher contribution of lower chlorinated and nonpersistent congeners, such as CB 52, CB 95, CB 101, CB 118 and CB 149 indicated that harbour porpoises are unable to metabolize these compounds. Similar to PCBs, higher contributions of other PBDEs than BDE 47 were observed in harbour porpoises, suggesting that this species has difficulties to metabolize these congeners. In contrast, harbour seals showed a higher ability to metabolize PCBs and PBDEs.