Will heavy metals travel from parent to offspring? If not, why aren’t fish that contain heavy metals hatched in places where water can be monitored?
In: Biology
It’s only in the grand sense that tuna collect mercury from the water. Tuna get the mercury from their food. The mercury absorption happens at the bottom of the food chain. Mercury is normally very rare in the environment so pretty much no living things have evolved ways to get rid of it. This means it builds up over the animals lifetime, and is what the term ‘bioaccumulation’ means. Tuna are top predators and both live a long time and eat things that have accumulated mercury themselves.
To get mercury free tuna you would need to give them food from an entire food chain raised in special low mercury water which would be outrageously expensive. To avoid mercury, move down the food chain. A pound of sardines that only ate plankton and lived for nine months will have less mercury than a pound of a tuna that spent 10 years eating those sardines.
Latest Answers