In environmental monitoring at mines in Greenland, blue mussels are often used as bioindicators for metal pollution due to their filtering behavior and ability to bioaccumulate metals. At the same time, blue mussels are also used as a food source for a number of different animals and humans.
Since environmental monitoring at mines in Greenland began in the 1970s, the use of mussels for environmental monitoring purposes has been based on the direct use of the soft mussel tissue. However, international standards have since developed adapted methods, which include, among other things, emptying the mussels' intestines before chemical analysis. A research project was launched in 2022 to investigate the significance of following international standards for data and long time series for individual mine sites. Mussels were collected at the former lead-zinc mine at Maarmorilik, where environmental monitoring has so far shown elevated values of lead and zinc in mussels. Samples of mussels with and without emptied intestines were chemically analyzed. A comparison of data showed that there was a small, but ‘statistically non-significant’ difference in the metal concentrations of the mussels depending on whether they had emptied their intestines before analysis. Overall, the project thus showed that there is no major shift in data in a time series if one switches to following international standards.
Data, conclusions and recommendations based on the project can be found in a DCE report:
