The chemical form and bodily distribution of mercury in marine fish

Abstract

The chemical form of mercury in fish has been controversial. Whereas the mercury in the muscle of fish has been reported to be mostly methylmercury by the workers in Sweden (Westöö 1966; Westöö and Rydälv 1969; Westöö and Rydälv 1971), the United States (Smith et al. 1971), and Canada (Zitko et al. 1971; Uteh et al. 1972), the methylmercury percentage of total mercury content has been considerably lower in the reports from Japan (Ueda et al. 1971), and Canada (Bache et al. 1971). The difference of analytical procedures, the kind of fish, and the chemical form of mercury in the environment have to be implicated. A comparative analysis for methylmercury and total mercury on the same fish sample by a Swedish and a Japanese laboratory, did not give a satisfactory solution, e.g., the methylmercury percentage was of the same order in some samples, but different in other samples (Berglund et al. 1971). Our intention in this report is to check the percentage of inorganic mercury in fish using the selective measurement of inorganic mercury by cold atomic absorption photometry (Magos and Cernik 1969).