Monitoring the environmental quality of marine waters through the analysis of biomineralization in bivalve shells

Abstract

Bivalve shells, such as Mytilus, offer great potential as environmental proxies. Analysis of the biomineralization process with determination of elemental composition gives information about the quality of environment and reflects the possible safety issues related to mollusk consumption because high pollutant quantities in shells indicate high pollutants presence in the consumed parts. In this work we study the biomineralization process in some bivalve shells and identify the presence of pollutants such as Pb, U, and other heavy metals using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) coupled with energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDAX). Through the obtained results, this methodology proved to be very reliable and fast for this purpose. We also show a correlation of the biomineralization results with the environmental conditions where the shells developed, such as estimation of water temperature by the Sr/Ca ratios, all the results proving the ability of bivalve shells of providing information about the environment quality.