The prenatal assimilation of minerals and metals in nestlings of a small passerine bird.

Abstract

Although certain metals can reach their highest concentrations in tissues of newly hatched nestlings, their sources have yet to be fully elucidated. Evidence for the differentiation of body reserves, including some chemical elements, during avian embryonic life and early post-hatching period is limited mostly to studies on poultry. Here, we present novel findings on the bioaccumulation and egg-to-nestling transfer of 10 minerals and metals, including non-essential potentially toxic chemical elements (Cu, Ni Cd, Pb, Zn, Ag, Mg, Fe, Co and Ca) in the tissues of the gastrointestinal tract (GT), whole body (WB) and carcass (CA) of nestlings of a small passerine bird, the Eurasian Reed Warbler Acrocephalus scirpaceus, breeding in an intensively fertilized fishpond habitat. Our findings show that concentrations of metals that are relevant to contaminated systems (Cu, Ni, Cd, Pb, Zn, Fe and Co) are the highest in GT tissues across all the nestling age classes examined (from hatching to day 9 of life). The important question emerged from our findings: why the hatchlings were characterized by higher metal concentrations in GT, WB and CA compared to older nestlings. We suggest that the prenatal accumulation of chemical elements assimilated from egg contents, and their subsequent utilization for building various tissues/internal organs by the growing embryo, is a reasonable explanation for this finding. More specifically, the potential functional mechanism explaining the highest concentrations of some trace metals in hatchlings seems to be associated with an extremely high rate of utilization of residual yolk metal resources that survived from the embryonic until the post-natal period. On the basis of our own work and literature data, we identified a presumable significant discrepancy in the actual rate of egg-to-nestling and egg-to-embryo metal transfer due to the eggshell being ignored (a commonly occurrence), and only the egg contents being treated as the basic repository of chemical elements for developing embryos. Much more research is needed on the prenatal assimilation and subsequent accumulation of chemical elements in a developing avian embryo, representing both the transition from near-to-hatching embryos to hatchlings, and then to older nestlings.