Nuclear Pollution and Its Effects on Marine Ecosystems

Abstract

Nuclear pollution is a severe environmental problem deriving mainly from industrial activities and can pose extremely negative affect to plants and animal bodies. Nuclear waste also has extreme negative effect on human bodies and can cause various diseases including skin disease, infant deficiency and cancer. There are few studies about the effect of nuclear waste to food webs and how it affects different trophic levels within the ecosystems. This study explains the effect of nuclear pollution on the marine ecosystems and focuses on the transportation of the pollutants through food webs as well as the sufferance of species in different trophic levels. It is concluded that nuclear pollutants can experience biomagnification within food webs and are transported to higher trophic levels by their food consumption. In addition, planktons, fish and seals are representative species of different trophic levels in marine food webs, and these species all suffer from nuclear contamination after nuclear pollutants enter their bodies through biomagnification. Future studies can focus on the process of energy transportation within food webs, such as whether the absorption of energy would be less efficient by higher trophic levels after consuming organisms with nuclear pollutants inside comparing to organisms with no nuclear pollutants. This study propose a explanation of respective effects of different trophic levels in marine ecosystems by nuclear pollutions, which can call on attention to the extreme negative effect of nuclear pollution to marine ecosystems.