Heavy Metals in Corals From Heron Island and Darwin Harbour, Australia

摘要

High, but not necessarily toxic, heavy metal concentrations associated with human activities such as harbour dredging or sewage and urban stormwater discharges can be used as tracers for monitoring purposes (e.g. Reichelt and Jones, 1994). Scleractinian corals are potentially useful indicator organisms for environmental monitoring, because their skeletons assimilate records of certain metals over hundreds of years. For example, nutrient availability over time can be traced in the growth-bands of coral skeletons, by measuring concentrations of metals recycled by the biosphere (Shen and Sanford, 1990), and the availabilities of several heavy metals which are toxic to marine organisms have been measured similarly (Linn et al., 1990). Studies have also been reported on the use of soft corals or coral tissues for monitoring purposes (Denton and Burdon-Jones, 1986; Hanna and Muir, 1990), but relevant work is limited.