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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Changes In Feeding And Crawling Rates Of Hydrobia Truncata (Prosobranchia: Hydrobiidae) In Response To Sedimentary Chlorophyll-A And Recently Egested Sediment, Valery Forbes, Glenn Lopez Mar 2012

Changes In Feeding And Crawling Rates Of Hydrobia Truncata (Prosobranchia: Hydrobiidae) In Response To Sedimentary Chlorophyll-A And Recently Egested Sediment, Valery Forbes, Glenn Lopez

Valery E Forbes

Experiments combining fluorescent particle tracer techniques with time-lapse video recording demonstrated that the gastropod Hydrobia truncata decreases crawling rate on patches rich in chlorophyll-a, while maintaining a constant feeding rate as sedimentary chlorophyll-a content varies. In contrast, H. truncata decreases feeding rate but does not change crawling rate upon encounter with patches of recently egested sediment. Depression of feeding rate is less pronounced if the egested material is enriched in chlorophyll-a. For deposit feeders inhabiting highly reworked sediments, the majority of available material may consist of sediment that has been recently egested. For an animal that responds negatively to recently …


Effects Of Sediment-Associated Copper To The Deposit-Feeding Snail, Potamopyrgus Antipodarum: A Comparison Of Cu Added In Aqueous Form Or As Nano- And Micro-Cuo Particles, Chengfang Pang, Henriette Selck, Superb Misra, Deborah Berhanu, Agnieszka Dybowska, Eugenia Valsami-Jones, Valery Forbes Mar 2012

Effects Of Sediment-Associated Copper To The Deposit-Feeding Snail, Potamopyrgus Antipodarum: A Comparison Of Cu Added In Aqueous Form Or As Nano- And Micro-Cuo Particles, Chengfang Pang, Henriette Selck, Superb Misra, Deborah Berhanu, Agnieszka Dybowska, Eugenia Valsami-Jones, Valery Forbes

Valery E Forbes

Increasing use of engineered nanoparticles (NPs) is likely to result in release of these particles to the aquatic environment where the NPs may eventually accumulate in sediment. However, little is known about the potential ecotoxicity of sediment-associated engineered NPs. We here consider the case of metal oxide NPs using CuO to understand if the effects of NPs differ from micron-sized particles of CuO and aqueous Cu (CuCl2). To address this issue, we compared effects of copper added to the sediment as aqueous Cu, nano- (6 nm) and micro- (<5 >μm) CuO particles on the deposit-feeding snail, Potamopyrgus antipodarum. Effects were …


Environmentally Sensitive Life-Cycle Traits Have Low Elasticity: Implications For Theory And Practice, Valery Forbes, Mette Olsen, Annemette Palmqvist, Peter Calow Mar 2012

Environmentally Sensitive Life-Cycle Traits Have Low Elasticity: Implications For Theory And Practice, Valery Forbes, Mette Olsen, Annemette Palmqvist, Peter Calow

Valery E Forbes

The relationships between population growth rate and the life-cycle traits contributing to it are nonlinear and variable. This has made it difficult for ecologists to consistently predict changes in population dynamics from observations on changes in life-cycle traits. We show that traits having a high sensitivity to chemical toxicants tend to have a low elasticity, meaning that changes in them have a relatively low impact on population growth rate, compared to other life-cycle traits. This makes evolutionary sense in that there should be selection against variability in population growth rate. In particular, we found that fecundity was generally more sensitive …


Ecological Risk Assessment Should Be Value-Relevant But Not Value-Biased, Peter Calow, Valery Forbes Mar 2012

Ecological Risk Assessment Should Be Value-Relevant But Not Value-Biased, Peter Calow, Valery Forbes

Valery E Forbes

To be useful in informing environmental management decisions, ecological risk assessments (ERAs) need to be expressed in value-relevant terms (USEPA 2009). Making decisions about accepting more or less ecological resources for more or less economic and social gain depends upon public values. ERAs have been criticized for not delivering value-relevant results and for therefore not being useful as a basis for management decisions (Gibbs 2010). We agree that ERAs need to be value-relevant, but we also must be explicit about what constitutes science and what constitutes values in this process. In a recent editorial, Backhaus et al. (2010) discuss the …


The Role Of Ecological Models In Linking Ecological Risk Assessment To Ecosystem Services In Agroecosystems, Nika Galic, Amelie Schmolke, Valery Forbes, Hans Baveco, Paul Van Den Brink Mar 2012

The Role Of Ecological Models In Linking Ecological Risk Assessment To Ecosystem Services In Agroecosystems, Nika Galic, Amelie Schmolke, Valery Forbes, Hans Baveco, Paul Van Den Brink

Valery E Forbes

Agricultural practices are essential for sustaining the human population, but at the same time they can directly disrupt ecosystem functioning. Ecological risk assessment (ERA) aims to estimate possible adverse effects of human activities on ecosystems and their parts. Current ERA practices, however, incorporate very little ecology and base the risk estimates on the results of standard tests with several standard species. The main obstacles for a more ecologically relevant ERA are the lack of clear protection goals and the inherent complexity of ecosystems that is hard to approach empirically. In this paper, we argue that the ecosystem services framework offers …


Nonylphenol Stimulates Fecundity But Not Population Growth Rate (Λ) Of Folsomia Candida, T. Widarto, P. Krogh, Valery Forbes Mar 2012

Nonylphenol Stimulates Fecundity But Not Population Growth Rate (Λ) Of Folsomia Candida, T. Widarto, P. Krogh, Valery Forbes

Valery E Forbes

The toxicity of nonylphenol (NP) to springtails was pronounced at 40 mg/kg dry weight soil, at which no animals survived. Body length and fecundity were the individual life-history traits significantly stimulated by sublethal concentrations of NP during a 64-day experiment. However, the effects of NP on these traits did not result in a statistically significant increase in population growth rate (λ). Decomposition analysis indicated that fecundity was the main contributor to the (non-significant) changes observed in λ. However, since the elasticity of fecundity was very low, large changes in fecundity resulted in a minimal effect on λ. Juvenile survival had …