Antibiotic drug residues are crucial to ensure food safety and minimize risk to human health. Herein, a sensitive high-performance liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC–MS/MS) method was developed and validated for the determination of antibiotic residues (mainly amphenicols) consisting of chloramphenicol (CAP), thiamphenicol (TAP), florfenicol (FF), and florfenicol amine (FFA) in aquatic products. Amphenicols were well separated on a Kinetex F5 (100 mm × 3.0 mm, 2.6 µm) chromatographic column with the mobile phases of 1 mM ammonium acetate aqueous solution and methanol solution and measured after positive and negative electrospray ionizations using four internal standards. To our knowledge, it was the first time to report the good performance of F5 column and four internal standards for the determination of amphenicols. The established method featured a good linear relationship between chromatographic peak area ratios and the concentrations of amphenicols (R² > 0.992), a wide and low detection matrix-based range of 0.01–5 μg/L, a low detection limit of 0.01 μg/kg, etc. The spiked assays evidenced the accuracy and reliability of the developed method with the recoveries between 84.0 and 105%, the intraday relative standard deviations (RSDs) over the range of 0.769–13.7%, and the interday RSDs over the range of 0.582–13.3%. Finally, the proposed method was applied to investigate amphenicol residues in various aquatic products, including fish, shrimp, crab, shellfish, and other aquatic species.

This study investigated the redistribution of cadmium (Cd) in edible tissues of swimming crabs (Portunus trituberculatus) during steaming and evaluated associated human health risks. Experimental results demonstrated that Cd was significantly transferred from brown meat to leg muscles, resulting in a nearly tenfold increase in Cd concentration in steamed leg muscles compared to raw tissues. Human health risk assessment results indicate that the target cancer risk (TCR) values for brown meat and cooking liquor range from 1.00E−3 to 1.00E−5, signaling non-negligible carcinogenic risks; The target hazard quotient (THQ) value of steamed leg muscles is nearly 10 times higher than before steaming, leading to an increase in the safety hazards of leg muscle consumption.The study provided more rational explanation of Cd redistribution in swimming crabs by steaming, and laid a foundation for the investigation of Cd migration and transformation in various tissues of swimming crabs after heat treatment.