Impact from food contained high level heavy metal

takayan

Premium Member
Recently one issue is happened in Japan. Frozen shrimp for fish is contaminated with high level of copper. It is 587μg/L from one cube of frozen shrimp. Some people suspect that the food causes sudden fish die.
I googled little bit if shrimp can contain copper. It looks shrimp contains high copper.
Is there any copper level that causes fish die?
 
Yes, in that everything can be toxic, it is just a matter of the dose and method of exposure.

https://www.vin.com/apputil/content...ic&catId=28922&id=3979892&ind=23&objTypeID=17 for an abstract of an article exactly about this.

Looking at what SeaChem lists for cupramine, the therapeutic dose is 0.5 mg/L, which is roughly what was found in that one cube of frozen shrimp. Based on that, I would doubt the copper in the shrimp would impact marine fish.
 
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Yes, in that everything can be toxic, it is just a matter of the dose and method of exposure.

https://www.vin.com/apputil/content...ic&catId=28922&id=3979892&ind=23&objTypeID=17 for an abstract of an article exactly about this.

Looking at what SeaChem lists for cupramine, the therapeutic dose is 0.5 mg/L, which is roughly what was found in that one cube of frozen shrimp. Based on that, I would doubt the copper in the shrimp would impact marine fish.



Thank you for the article!
I have not read it yet, so I'll read it later.
For cupramine, it is the concentration in the water. If fish eats the copper contaminated food every day, is not it problem? I do not know the mechanism how the copper accumulates in the fish instead of pooping out.
 
It is less an article than an abstract to an article, so not as useful as I initially thought.

In regards to Cupramine, at the dose the company recommends the fish is literally surrounded, breathing and swallowing that concentration of copper continuously.

On top of that, consider that invertebrates are known to be much more sensitive to copper than fish. If these shrimp were living with that concentrated in their body, then likely that isn't an amount that is going to be a problem to a fish eating that shrimp.

Think of it this way: Rather than thinking of it in terms of concentration, think of it in terms of actual amount of copper. A chunk of shrimp 1cm to a side is 1g of tissue (most animal tissue is largely water). So that chunk of shrimp flesh with 587 micrograms/L has 587 nanograms of copper in it. Now, back to concentrations. Unless you are talking about something like an angler/frogfish, a typical fish that would be eating a whole 1cm^3 of shrimp is going to be at least 10 times larger than the chunk, or that chunk is going to be distributed to a number of smaller fish who is total represent at least 10x larger volume. That gives a concentration in the fish of 58.7 micrograms/L. Compare that to Cupramine treatment where the fish is literally being bathed in 500 micrograms/L.
 
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