A SURVEY OF BIOAVAILABLE FRACTION OF PERSISTANT ORGANIC POLLUTANTS IN THE POLLUTED AREAS ON LAKE SHKODRA

The Shkodra Lake is located on the border between Montenegro and Albania and is the largest lake in Balkan. During the last decades, the anthropogenic pollution is going to be significant in this area. The exposure of aquatic biota to certain HOPs is of immediate concern because of the ability of some of these compounds to bioaccumulate and induce either lethal or sub-lethal toxicity including mutagenic, carcinogenic, teratogenic and endocrine disrupting effects on species at all tropic levels and in doing so disrupt the normal functioning of the whole ecosystem. Consequently, the regulatory monitoring and risk assessment of hydrophobic contaminants in surface waters is generally hampered by the inability to measure reliably these low (and sometimes fluctuating) concentrations. In order to solve this problem and to monitor the bioavailable fraction of more hydrophobic organic micropollutants is used the laboratory extraction of water samples by using a polymeric material as a receiving phase as polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) the most applied polymer. The concentrations of a number of PAHs in lake Shkodra water ranged from 0.01-5 ng/L.