Fig 1.
Locations in the outer Bay of Fundy where seawater, plankton and nekton collections were made, on consecutive years between 2000 and 2002, from the research vessel CCMV Navicula.
Table 1.
Mercury concentrations in bulk seawater between 2000 and 2002, from the approaches to the Bay of Fundy, Gulf of Maine.
Table 2.
Taxonomic composition of planktonic to pelagic size groupings.
Fig 2.
The relationship between MeHg and THg concentrations on both an organism (ng size category/g wet weight) and a volume (pg size category/m3 seawater) basis plotted against organism size (ESD).
Also illustrated on a volume basis is biomass (mg wet weight/m3 seawater) versus ESD.
Table 3.
Methylmercury and total mercury concentrations (wet weight basis) in selected categories that represent the food web located at the approaches to the Bay of Fundy, Gulf of Maine.
Fig 3.
The relationship between stable isotope values of δ13 C versus δ15 N for organisms from the components of the marine ecosystem at the outer Bay of Fundy, Gulf of Maine.
Fig 4.
The relationship between the estimated spherical diameter (ESD) of an organism and its calculated trophic level from δ15 N values, for that portion of the food web from the outer Bay of Fundy where stable isotopes were measured.
Y = 0.003X6.7, r2 = 0.69, n = 202.
Table 4.
Methylmercury (MeHg) and total mercury (THg) bioconcentration factors (BCF) on a wet weight basis between seston/plankton and seawater in the world oceans.
Fig 5.
Potential surface area available for mercury sorption over the marine size spectrum calculated from the nekton/plankton categories reported here (16mm—25μm), together with the particulate (1μm ~ 450nm) and colloidal (~ 450nm- 5nm) material from the literature [113, 114].
This particulate fraction includes nanoplankton, bacteria, cyanobacteria, picoeukaryotes, viruses and inert particulates [102].
Table 5.
Biomagnification factors (BMF) calculated from both size spectra and nitrogen isotope based trophic levels.
Fig 6.
The relationship between ng THg/g wet weight and trophic level (a) and equivalent spherical diameter (b), and between ng MeHg/g wet weight and trophic level (c) and equivalent spherical diameter (d).
Table 6.
Bioaccumulation power (b) of mercury (THg or MeHg) in comprehensive marine food web studies, where Log10[mercury] = b(δ15N) − a and the total magnification factor is (TMF) = 10b.