Bulletin of the Society of Sea Water Science, Japan

The environment and ecosystem of coastal waters depend on materials and life supplies from the land basin. Therefore, forest devastation is directly linked to ocean desertification, so integrated management of both is important. In this paper, we focused on versatile substances, i.e. “humic substances”, which can stably transport substances into the sea and have high plant-physiological activity, and provide explanations based on examples of research conducted to date. It is important to discuss the “sustainability” and “diversity” of seawater science in a multidisciplinary and systematic way by consolidating resources, energy, and the environment into a single reaction equation. In the case of research on the environment and biological resources, we propose adding “humic substances”, which provide a more versatile reaction field to this multifaceted reaction equation.

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　Elemental tracers in shark vertebra have led to reports of shark development, temperature changes, as well as reports that shark vertebrae may be used to estimate age and growth. However, the difficulty of obtaining sharks and the need to salvage and process sharks on board due to their large size also make them a useful species on a commercial basis. In addition to calcium（ Ca） and strontium（Sr）, concentrations of manganese （Mn） and barium （Ba） have been obtained. In this report, the elemental distribution of the vertebrae of blue sharks, which are abundant in the seas around Japan, was measured using LA/ICP-MS. The results agreed well with previously reported elemental distribution of the vertebrae of blue sharks inhabiting the coastal areas of California: 1） Ca and Sr were concentrated in the central depression, 2） Ba and Mn were found to be uniformly distributed in the vertebra without the influence of ring lines or other factors. Some papers have suggested that Ba is supplied by upwelling currents in the Gulf of California, but upwelling currents are not common in the study area. Similar to the alkaline earth metals Ca and Sr, Ba is taken up by living organisms without element fractionation, but due to its toxicity, we made a hypothesis that rather than being stored in biological organs, Ba may be stored in vertebra, which are relatively less affected by Ba toxicity.

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