Determination of the Rate of 90Sr and 137Cs Influx into the Organism of Freshwater Fishes

Strontium metabolism in the juvenile Lake Sturgeon, Acipenser fulvescens (Rafinesque, 1817), and further evaluation of the isotope as a marking tool for stock discrimination

“…This was approx. four orders of magnitude higher than the strontium flux observed in the current study and more recently in strontium flux rates reported for common carp (2.74 lmol g À1 h À1 ); silver carp, Hypophthalmichthys molitrix (1.26 lmol g À1 h À1 ); bighead carp, Hypophthalmichthys nobilis (1.47 lmol g À1 h À1 ); grass carp, Ctenopharyngodon idella (1.47 lmol g À1 h À1 ); Prussian carp, Carassius gibelio (1.79 lmol g À1 h À1 ); European perch, Perca fluviatilis (0.74 lmol g À1 h À1 ); and northern pike, Esox lucius (0.95 lmol g À1 h À1 ) (Belyaev et al, 2011), all in the micromolar range and again substantially higher than those estimated in the present study for Lake Sturgeon. The increased influx rates reported for the teleost fish in previous studies were likely due to the differences in calcium metabo- Fig.…”

“…That said, surprisingly few studies have examined the underlying physiological mechanisms that may influence the success or failure, and thus interpretation, of stable isotopic signatures in the hard tissues of fish despite the growing frequency of using stable isotopes to mark fish as a management tool for stock discrimination. Movement or flux of whole body strontium has been examined in a number of teleosts (Rosenthal, ; Belyaev et al., ), with the most comprehensive understanding of strontium transport kinetics in fish being determined in the common carp, Cyprinus carpio (Chowdhury et al., ; Chowdhury and Blust, ,b, ). Using the radioisotope 90 Sr it has been shown that strontium is preferentially accumulated in the bones of the organism, supporting the notion that strontium likely acts as a calcium mimic (Rosenthal, ; Martin and Goldberg, ; Simmons et al., ; Yankovich, ).…”