Fish apparently are high in Mercury is this because of human population or is this is natural?

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Fish apparently are high in Mercury is this because of human population or is this is natural?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Fish naturally concentrate mercury from their surroundings. Humans actually do this too.

By adding mercury to seawater, we add mercury to the fish’s environment for it to concentrate.

So it’s sort of both.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Both. Mercury is a naturally occurring element, so it’s found in the environment just about everywhere in small amounts, but humans add a lot of extra mercury from pollution. It gets concentrated the higher up in the food chain as the smallest fish eat plankton and other small organisms that have absorbed mercury, and medium sized fish eat those fish, and larger fish eat those medium sized fish, and so on. So mercury tends to be concentrated the most in larger fish or fish that have lived a long time, because they’ve eaten more smaller fish and thus have ingested more mercury.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The other answers have it covered re: both naturally occurring and pollution. Adding that a specific thing that happens in some farm-raised fish is that they are fed fish from those ponds or other farms. So you get multiple cycles of mercury and other pollutants build-up.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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