Influence of climate change on interannual variation in contaminant body burden in Gulf of Mexico oysters

摘要

As part of NOAA's National Status and Trends Mussel Watch Program, oysters were sampled along the Gulf of Mexico coast each winter from 1986 to 1 992 and analyzed for trace metal, polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH), and pesticide body burden. We identified contaminant variables for which large-scale climate processes played an important role in establishing the interannual variation in body burden by examining cases where body burdens rose or fell more or less in unison over broad geographic regions and distinguished these concordant changes from cases where bays varied independently. Of the 11 metals analyzed, nine had scales of concordancy ≤ 100 km. Ni and Se, however, had among the largest scales of concordancy in the study, ≥ 1200 km.