In the early 2000s, it was already widely known that some fish contained mercury. Coal-fired power plants emitted a form of inorganic mercury into the air, where it would gradually fall back to earth, mix into ocean water, and be ingested by microbes, which converted it to highly toxic methylmercury. These microbes would then be consumed by small fish, which would be consumed by larger fish, and so on up the food chain. Methylmercury tends to accumulate in animal tissue, so large fish were building up high levels of the toxin. This was why the FDA already had guidelines regulating the level of
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