Mercury Biomagnification

Everywhere throughout the world you can find traces of mercury in every living organism. Mercury has become a permanent addition into our biological systems. Mercury can accumulate in multiple tissues of an organism. Mostly it accumulates in the muscle and fat tissues, but it could accumulate in areas not so easily digested by predators such as feathers, hair, nails, and bones. In these areas, the mercury cannot biomagnify or intensify in concentration throughout the higher trophic levels. However, the mercury that accumulates in muscle or fat tissues can be digested by predators where the concentration of the mercury can intensify since predators will consume more prey. The larger the predator the higher the concentration of any toxicant. 

There are many factors that can play into how high of mercury concentrations an organism will have. The main factors being age, trophic level, bioenergetics, and body size. As mentioned before larger predators will have a higher mercury concentration because they must consume more food. Same logic applies for organisms that are at higher trophic levels. Since these organisms are generally apex predators the mercury concentrations will biomagnify in these species. Older organisms will have higher concentrations of mercury because they have lived longer and therefore have had the mercury accumulate longer in their tissues. Based on bioenergetics, organisms that grow slower will also have higher amounts of mercury in their systems. This would explain why tiger sharks have lower amounts of mercury than blacktip reef sharks although they are much larger. Tiger sharks grow at fast rates and therefore dilute their mercury concentrations.