Literature Search
Evidence of mercury contamination of freshwater and marine ecosystems has increased since the 1960's. During the summer of 2005, we conducted a literature search that revealed over 1300 papers on mercury contamination of biological organisms (excluding papers on bacteria). A figure of the number of mercury papers published per year are shown below. These papers are listed alphabetically by author in the PDF (click HERE for download). Please let me know of any references that we have overlooked.

Literature Search Criteria
We searched Cambridge Abstracts for the following keyword combinations: "mercury" and "fish," "mercury" and "zooplankton," and "mercury" and "phytoplankton." We identified all papers in which both words appeared anywhere in the paper. We then searched all authors of these papers, combining their names with "mercury." Finally we searched the names of authors in the bibliographies of mercury-related papers in our personal reprint collection.

Inclusion in the Database
We included all papers that dealt with mercury concentrations in non-bacterial aquatic biota. We included studies from both marine and freshwater systems. We included studies that dealt with terrestrial organisms if they also examined mercury concentrations in aquatic biota. We did not include papers that dealt primarily with sediment-mercury interactions or the chemistry of mercury in water unless they directly dealt with macroscopic aquatic biota or had relevance to the issuance of fish consumption advisories. We did not include toxicology/mercury physiology studies unless they directly dealt with bioaccumulation of mercury in macroscopic aquatic biota through the food web. We included papers that dealt with warning anglers about mercury concentration in fish and we included studies examining how mercury concentration of fish feed affects mercury concentration of farm-raised fish. This bibliography was developed with the help of Jaron Hill, Matt Chumchal and Bill McClain

Click HERE to download Mercury Bibliography as a PDF