Bioaccumulation of Heavy Metals in Freshwater Snails Bellamya Bengalensis, and Lymnea Accuminata from Malangaon Wetland of Dhule District (maharashtra) India

Heavy metal pollution in aquatic ecosystem has been recognized as a serious environmental problem. In many cases, heavy metals occur in natural water bodies at levels below their toxic thresholds, however, due to their nondegradable nature, such low concentrations may still pose risk of damage via uptake and subsequent bioaccumulation by organisms, which cannot effectively metabolize and excrete the absorbed metals. Several scientific observations have shown that heavy metals are bioconcentrated or bioaccumulated in one or several compartments across food webs (Soegianto and Irawan, 2008, Celechovska et al., 2008). Besides, the contamination of resources with trace elements may have devastating effect on natural ecosystem functioning, as well as decrease of biodiversity and extinction of sensitive taxa (Bogatov and Bogatova, 2009; Bonanno and Giudice, 2010). Metal bioaccumulation can be of importance from the public health point of view, especially when a human consumes the accumulators. Secondly, this phenomenon is now being exploited in the assessment of environmental quality, in addition to chemical surveys of water and sediment (Javanshir and Shapoori, 2011).