Norin 1985 - Swedish fish arsenic speciation

Norin, Vahter, Christakopoulos, and Sandstrom measured total arsenic and inorganic arsenic in fish from arsenic-polluted and reference brackish and freshwater sites in Sweden. The source reports fish meat and liver on a wet-weight basis. It is useful because total arsenic and inorganic arsenic are quantified separately; total arsenic is not a proxy for inorganic arsenic.

Key numbers

Table 1 reports fish-meat concentrations on a wet-weight basis as As in ug As/g; the extracted PDF text renders the micro sign as p. Inorganic arsenic values are duplicate determinations on pooled samples.

The abstract summarizes total arsenic in fish from polluted brackish water as 0.2-2.6 ug As/g fish meat and polluted freshwater as 0.05-0.24 ug As/g fish meat; these were 1.4-5 times higher than corresponding unpolluted waters. For most fish species, inorganic arsenic constituted 5-12% of total arsenic, corresponding to 0.01-0.15 ug As/g fish meat.

The Results text states that the highest total arsenic concentrations were in fourhorn sculpin (2.6 +/- 0.94 ug As/g) and Baltic herring (1.6 +/- 0.51 ug As/g) from the polluted brackish-water area. Freshwater fish generally had total arsenic below 0.3 ug As/g, although pike from polluted Lake Bodatrask had a significantly higher total arsenic concentration than pike from the reference lakes.

For liver, Table 2 reports total arsenic and inorganic arsenic separately. Examples include polluted-brackish perch liver total As 1.8 +/- 0.48 ug As/g with iAs 0.07;0.06, and polluted-brackish pike liver total As 0.43 +/- 0.08 ug As/g with iAs 0.06;0.06.

Methods (brief)

Fish were captured mainly by net and stored at -20 °C until analysis. Total arsenic was measured in meat and liver from four to five fish of each species by AAS after dry ashing and arsine generation. Inorganic arsenic was measured in pooled 5 g samples using HBr/HCl distillation based on Lunde and modified by Flanjak, followed by AAS. NBS standard water and neutron activation analysis cross-checks were used for quality control.

Implications

This source supplies direct fish occurrence evidence and a clear speciation warning: polluted-water fish accumulated more total arsenic, but the major part of arsenic remained organic, and inorganic arsenic was a smaller measured fraction. Product routing should preserve fish-meat wet-weight basis and keep brackish/freshwater and polluted/reference context visible. Total arsenic values from this paper must not be pooled as inorganic arsenic.

Verification notes

• PDF text was extracted with pdftotext -layout; title/byline, abstract, sample collection, total-As and iAs methods, Table 1, Table 2, and discussion were checked in /tmp/f3_unrepresented_texts/norin1985.txt.
• DOI text was not found in the extracted PDF; DOI is left null. Raw-handle, raw-path, and cite-key checks found no existing source page before creation.
• Units are preserved as ug As/g wet weight; the extracted text renders the micro sign as p, so no conversion was performed.
• Speciation: tAs and iAs are separately reported. Inorganic arsenic duplicate values are not averaged.
• Frontmatter slugs were checked against docs/gpt-collaboration/taxonomy-snapshot.md; species-level fish slugs for fourhorn sculpin, burbot, Baltic herring, pike, perch, and roach are not present.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.