Assessing bioaccumulation with biomagnification factors from dietary bioaccumulation tests

Despite the fact that the UN Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants specifically acknowledges that Arctic ecosystems and Indigenous communities are particularly at risk due to biomagnification of contaminants in traditional foods, the bioconcentration factor (BCF) of substances in fish remains the preferred metric for identifying the biomagnification potential of organic substances. The BCF measures uptake of substances from water in water-breathing organisms, but not biomagnification of contaminants from food sources. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the biomagnification factor (BMF) can be used in bioaccumulation assessments. To address this question, data from dietary and aqueous bioaccumulation studies in fish were compiled for a wide range of substances in fish to (i) investigate the potential correlation between the BCF and the BMF for the same substance in the same fish species and (ii) investigate computational methods for deriving both the BMF and BCF from the results of empirical dietary bioaccumulation tests. The analysis concludes that (i) empirical correlations between the BCF and BMF are of limited use for bioaccumulation assessment; (ii) dietary bioaccumulation test results can be used for bioaccumulation screening; and supports the use of both the BMF and the BCF for assessing the bioaccumulation potential of substances in water-breathing organisms.