Feeding strategy of pelagic fishes caught in aggregated schools and vulnerability to ingesting anthropogenic items in the western equatorial Atlantic Ocean

From prey to predators: Evidence of microplastic trophic transfer in tuna and large pelagic species in the southwestern Tropical Atlantic

“…This low frequency of occurrence has also been observed in other studies analysing the ingestion of marine debris in T. albacares, T. obesus and Katsuwonus pelamis (FO= 0, 0 and 0.75%, respectively) from the Western Atlantic (de Mesquita et al, 2021), in T. albacares from the South Pacific subtropical gyre (2%) (Chagnon et al, 2018), and in K. pelamis, T. albacares, C. hippurus, and T. obesus (FO= 0, 0, 2 and 9%, respectively) from the North Pacific subtropical gyre (Choy and Drazen, 2013). Researchers often suggest that the lower intake of large plastics by pelagic fishes can be explained due to geographical location (de Mesquita et al, 2021) since plastics tend to accumulate in oceanic gyres (Cózar et al, 2014;Jiang et al, 2020) and areas that do not have a convergence zone would accumulate fewer plastics.…”

“…In the South Atlantic, some data regarding the ingestion of plastic debris by pelagic predators are available: in the southeast-south of Brazil (Neto et al, 2020), on the coast of Salvador, in northeast Brazil (Miranda and de Carvalho-Souza, 2016), and reports for the Western Equatorial Atlantic (de Mesquita et al, 2021;Menezes et al, 2019;Vaske-Júnior and Lessa, 2004). However, despite their vast importance as a source of wealth and food security worldwide, to our best knowledge, there is no information regarding the microplastic contamination in tuna and large pelagic species in the SWTA.…”