A contaminação antrópica e seus efeitos em três estuários do litoral do Ceará, Nordeste do Brasil - revisão

Abstract

Estuaries, where rivers meet the ocean in coastal areas, have attractive biodiversity for exploration and human activities. However, the anthropic activities interfere on natural dynamics, impacting the estuaries by habitat destruction and the addition of compounds capable of generating lethal and sublethal effects on organisms. In the Ceará State, the estuaries of the rivers Ceará, Pacoti and Jaguaribe are relevant because their locations, socioeconomic importance and interactions with coastal communities. Due to the advance of deterioration in the quality of these estuaries, this paper presents a review considering the presence of contaminants in water and sediment, and their toxic effects to the biota. Increasing contamination was evidenced for these estuaries, mainly due to metals, especially over the last 10 years. Biological damages were seen on local species and laboratorial toxicity tests indicated the toxicity potential, both acute and chronic, of the contaminants in the three estuaries, including at Pacoti estuary, which was a former reference location. Despite protection initiatives, the impacts on these estuaries are frequent, continuous and increasing. The data highlight that there are serious gaps of knowledge about the local contamination and reinforce the urgent need for more research and control actions to prevent future impacts of ecosystem scale.