Sardines in hot water: Unravelling plastic fibre ingestion and feeding behaviour effects

Small pelagics are small fish species often schooling that mainly feed on planktonic organisms and are foraging species of larger animals. These species have experienced important declines in their wild populations during the last decades. For instance, the decrease of the European sardine (Sardina pilchardus) body condition has had a detrimental impact on its landings, leaving their commercial fishing unprofitable in some Mediterranean areas. The causes for this decline are not clearly established but seems to be mainly related to changes with planktonic communities inducing a switch in their foraging behaviour from particulate-feeding to filter-feeding. Moreover, it has been highlighted that sardines ingest plastic fibres throughout their natural spatial distribution, suggesting this additional pollution as a possible new threat affecting their populations’ health. In this study we developped an experimental setup allowing us to maintain wild fish in captive controlled conditions in order to test the possible factors affecting plastic fibres ingestion in sardines. We demonstrate that sardines ingest fibres from water, and the amount of fibres ingested is highly impacted by their feeding behaviour. Sardines feeding by filtration ingest less food but more plastic fibres (mean = 4.95 fibres / ind; SD = 3.43), compared to sardines that feed by particulate-feeding (mean = 0.6 fibres / ind; SD = 1.04). Moreover, a decrease in sardine body condition factor was detected for filter-feeding individuals, mostly linked to the lower amount of food they ingested rather than to the fibre ingestion itself. Nonetheless, higher water temperature seems to accelerate the pattern of fibre expulsion in filter-feeding sardines. Alltogether, it is suggested that plastic fibres pollution and phytoplanctonic changes under global change, might synergistically act at disturbing the health of this species in wild populations.