Juvenile food limitation in standardized tests: a warning to ecotoxicologists.

ABSTRACT: Standard ecotoxicological tests are as simple as possible and food sources are mainly chosen for practical reasons. Since some organisms change their food preferences during the life-cycle, they might be food limited at some stage if we do not account for such a switch. As organisms tend to respond more sensitively to toxicant exposure under food limitation, the interpretation of test results may then be biased. Using a reformulation of the von Bertalanffy model to analyze growth data of the pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis, we detected food limitation in the early juvenile phase. The snails were held under conditions proposed for a standardized test protocol, which prescribes lettuce as food source. Additional experiments showed that juveniles grow considerably faster when fed with fish flake

SUBMITTER: Zimmer EI 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3475972 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature