Submerged macrophytes mitigate direct and indirect insecticide effects in freshwater communities.

ABSTRACT: Understanding how ecological interactions mitigate the impacts of perturbations such as pesticides in biological communities is an important basic and applied question for ecologists. In aquatic ecosystems, new evidence from microcosm experiments suggests that submerged macrophytes can buffer cladocerans from pulse exposures to the widely used insecticide malathion, and that mitigation increases with macrophyte density. However, whether these results scale up to more complex aquatic communities where ecological interactions such as competition can alter toxicity is unknown. Further, macrophyte abilities to mitigate different insecticide exposure scenarios (i.e. single versus repeated pulses) have never been tested. To address these gaps, we performed a factorial mesocosm experiment examini

SUBMITTER: Brogan WR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4433326 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature