Research on ecotoxicology of microplastics on freshwater aquatic organisms

ABSTRACT

As a new type of pollutant, microplastics are an emerging scientific and social concern in the environment and are widely distributed in the aquatic environment and organism. Nowadays, researches on microplastic pollution mainly focus on the marine environment. As a bridge for the migration of microplastics from the terrestrial environment to the marine environment, the freshwater environment has been deserved more attention. Published articles on microplastics in freshwater environments were reviewed in this paper, and four typical behaviors of microplastics were summarized: biological ingestion, biological attachment, adsorption of pollutants and release of plasticizers. In addition, the progress in research and results on the ecological toxicity of microplastics to freshwater organisms was also analyzed. Finally, emphasis on future research on the toxicity of microplastics to freshwater aquatics organisms was made throughout this review as a tool in microplastic risk assessment research.

KEYWORDS:

• Microplastics
• freshwater environments
• aquatic organisms
• ecotoxicology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China[grant number 2018YFD0900805]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 51109060]; and China Scholarship Council [grant number 201406715015].