Simultaneous evaluation of the acute effects of chemicals on seven aquatic species

Abstract

A cost‐effective testing procedure is described that measures the acute aquatic effects of a single test chemical on seven aquatic species simultaneously: Asellus intermedius (pillbug), Daphnia magna (water flea), Dugesia tigrina (flatworm), Gammarus fasciatus (sideswimmer), Helisoma trivolvis (snail), Lumbriculus variegatus (segmented worm) and Pimephales promelas (fathead minnow). These species were chosen because of their ecological importance, diversity and amenability to laboratory culturing. Twenty‐seven commercial inorganic and organic chemicals were tested using the simultaneous exposure procedure. The 96‐h LC50 values were derived for each species and the results compared with literature values. The reproducibility of the results achieved using this testing procedure was shown to be very good. The results compare favorably with 96‐h LC50 values from single‐species tests. The susceptibility of test animals as a function of species and chemical compound was evaluated. Water fleas were found to be as susceptible as, or more so than, the other aquatic organisms for all compounds tested. The relative sensitivities of the other test species were found to be highly chemical dependent.

Ecological risk assessment of copper and cadmium in surface waters of Chesapeake Bay watershed

“…Hardness data were available for 73 species, and the distribution of these data is presented in Figure 2. The range of acute toxicity values was from 1.3 μg/L for Daphnia to 13,000 μg/L for an aquatic sowbug [55]. Within the fish trophic group, the Cyprinidae and Salmonidae families contained species that were more sensitive to acute copper exposures than the other eight families of freshwater fish.…”

The Toxicity and Uptake of As, Cr and Zn in a Stygobitic Syncarid (Syncarida: Bathynellidae)

“…(48-h EC50 0.396-6.35 mg Cr/L [34]) all overlap the 96-h LC50 value for the syncarids (1.8 mg Cr/L). The 96-h LC50 values for D. magna exposed to Cr (0.07-0.16 mg Cr/L, [35,36]) were approximately an order of magnitude lower than those for the syncarids tested here, as seen in Table 2. The 14-day LC50 value (0.5 mg Cr/L) is also within the range of values for copepods from the same study site (0.03-1.06 mg Cr/L [16]) and a 10-day LC50 for N. rhenorhodanensis (0.23 mg Cr/L [32]) and less than those for a range of epigean taxa [32,36].…”

Ecotoxicity Evaluation of Industrial Discharge Waters and Metallic Solutions using Two Organisms (Lactuca sativa and Daphnia magna)

“…To our knowledge, few studies have assessed the environmental impact of discharge water or synthetic solutions on more than one bioindicator [7,12,14,35,36]. Bioassay batteries have already been shown to be a relevant way to evaluate toxicity, irrespective of the ecosystem studied [7,36,37]. Sensitivity differences observed between daphnids and lettuce (Tables 2-4) also occurred on comparison with data from the literature ( Table 1).…”