Experimental development of a new protocol for extraction and characterization of microplastics in fish tissues: First observations in commercial species from Adriatic Sea

Impacts of temperature and selected chemical digestion methods on microplastic particles

“…Avio et al [12] found that only approximately 4% of polyethylene and polystyrene was recovered from fish tissues digested in HNO 3 at 100 8C. The losses and changes in physical particle character were attributed to the aggressive nature of nitric acid [12] and the combined effects of temperature and reaction with the strong acid [25]. In this case, the losses of the microbeads were solely attributed to the heat applied or generated during the digestions, based on obtaining similar results with boiling water only.…”

“…In addition to complete loss of nylon microplastic particles, Claessens et al [21] noted melting and clumping of polystyrene spheres when using a strong HNO 3 solution at 100 8C, and Catarino et al [25] observed fusing of some polyethylene terephthalate and highdensity polyethylene particles under similar conditions. Avio et al [12] found that only approximately 4% of polyethylene and polystyrene was recovered from fish tissues digested in HNO 3 at 100 8C. The losses and changes in physical particle character were attributed to the aggressive nature of nitric acid [12] and the combined effects of temperature and reaction with the strong acid [25].…”

Combining Litter Observations with a Regional Ocean Model to Identify Sources and Sinks of Floating Debris in a Semi-enclosed Basin: The Adriatic Sea

“…Plastic litter has been reported from northern Adriatic beaches (Laglbauer et al, 2014;Munari et al, 2016), coastal sediments (Vianello et al, 2013;Blašković et al, 2017), surface waters (Suaria and Aliani, 2014;Gajšt et al, 2016;Suaria et al, 2016) and in very large amounts on the seafloor (Galgani et al, 2000;Strafella et al, 2015;Pasquini et al, 2016), where litter densities are among the highest of the entire Mediterranean basin. Ingestion of plastic by Adriatic fauna has been reported for marine turtles (Lazar and Gračan, 2011;Poppi et al, 2012), sperm whales (Mazzariol et al, 2011) and dolphins (Pribanic et al, 1999) as well as from commercial fish (Avio et al, 2015) and crustacean species (Wieczorek et al, 1999). Liubartseva et al (2016) modeled the transport of AMD using a high-resolution ocean model and a Markov chain to simulate passive particle trajectories, based on transition probability computed from ensemble model trajectories.…”

Microplastics in seafood: Benchmark protocol for their extraction and characterization

“…They can be classified as acidic (Claessens et al, 2013;De Witte et al, 2014), alkaline (Cole et al, 2014;Foekema et al, 2013), oxidizing (Nuelle et al, 2014;Avio et al, 2015) and enzymatic methods (Cole et al, 2014). However, most of these methods are not adapted for large scale monitoring as they are either time consuming or too expensive to be implemented on a large scale.…”