Alexandra Martins, Lúcia Guilhermino,

Transgenerational effects and recovery of microplastics exposure in model populations of the
freshwater cladoceran Daphnia magna Straus,

Science of The Total Environment, Volumes 631–632, 1 August 2018, Pages 421-428, ISSN 0048-9697,

Abstract:

The environmental contamination by microplastics is a global challenge to ecosystem and human health, and the knowledge on the long-term effects of such particles is limited. Thus, the effects of microplastics and post-exposure recovery were investigated over 4 generations (F0, F1, F2, F3) using Daphnia magna as model. Effect criteria were parental mortality, growth, several reproductive parameters, and population growth rate.
Microplastics exposure (0.1 mg/l of pristine polymer microspheres 1–5 μm diameter) caused parental mortality (10–100%), and significantly (p ≤ 0.05) decreased growth, reproduction, and population growth rate leading to the extinction of the microplastics-exposed model population in the F1 generation.
Females descending from those exposed to microplastics in F0 and exposed to clean medium presented some
recovery but up to the F3 generation they still had significantly (p ≤ 0.05) reduced growth, reproduction, and population growth rate.
Overall, these results indicate that D. magna recovery from chronic exposure to microplastics may take several generations, and that the continuous exposure over generations to microplastics may cause population extinction. These findings have implications to aquatic ecosystem functioning and services, and raise concern on the long-term animal and human exposure to microplastics through diverse routes.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969718308088/pdfft?md5=6fa0f832e5a8190864431ace24bb80e0&pid=1-s2.0-S0048969718308088-main.pdf

https://drive.google.com/open?id=11576m0z5uvxKc859MUCll_qFritxwJBx
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.03.054.(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969718308088)